[Uml-devel] CASE tools and IDEs

[Carsten Pfeiffer]

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On Wednesday 29 January 2003 17:39, Andrew Sutton wrote:

> first, IDE's are overly compiler-centric. developers have to deal with
> files and directories because that's what the build environment
> understandes. the files don't really correspond to anything useful from the
> development standpoint. all we care about is class and implementation - i
> don't give a shit what file its in.

Doesn't Gideon provide a class view, giving you access to methods and 
attributes of classes, without the need to know which files those are in?

> second, IDE's are good if all you care about is the code. sure, the class
> view is useful - i guess, but it doesn't provide a very good abstraction
> for viewing the project. neither does the file view. its just lists of
> classes and files and the like.

You can argue the other way round as well. CASE tools are fine, but they don't 
support coding very well. Do you know how long it takes and how often you 
have to click just to add one method with a few parameters to a class? It's 
so much easier to simply type it in the header-file.

That's also the reason why XML-Spy is such a successful XML-IDE -- they 
support xml-editing on the code level while also supporting other views. 
Creating or editing XML in a strict tree-editor is really painful.

You need both highlevel support AND coding support. That's also what Eclipse 
is doing successfully.

> traditionally, they haven't really been to useful for development because
> they've not been tied to the IDE. also, roundtrip engineering (making a
> change to the code affects the design in real time and vice versa) hasn't
> been implemented very well. additionally, CASE tools don't provide really
> good mechanisms for navigating the possible abstractions of your project.
> usually, there's a tree view with all your classes and use cases and
> diagrams, but that's pretty weak. UML allows for significantly more
> complicated abstractions - for example, viewing inheritance or containment
> hierarchies for a library.

See ArcStyler (www.arcstyler.com) for an excellent round-trip IDE. And 
ArcStyler even supports the MDA. Still, at some point, you have to start 
coding and that's where they integrate a codebased IDE (i.e. JBuilder, IIRC).

> what a lot of people don't know is that UML is designed to contain
> implementation as much as specification. in other words, the CASE tool

Huh! The UML is designed to be language and platform neutral.... and they're 
developing MDA ( http://www.omg.org/mda/ ) to bring the PIMs and PSMs 
(platform independent and platform specific models) together.

> could become the IDE. that, as much as anything is my real goal for
> Umbrello - to replace the standard IDE with a CASE tool. all that's missing
> is adaptations to UML to support the modeling of build environments,
> compiler options and the like. hmmm... that sounds like a master's thesis.

I think the Eclipse / Gideon approach is much more useful.

Cheers
Carsten Pfeiffer
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