Fw: [Uml-devel] CASE tools and IDEs

[Simon Mendy]

Hello guys, 
I think my question of the last evening has put forward some interesting questions about what is an IDE and what  the relationship between an IDE and and CASE TOOL like Umbrello should be. I think too that some of you have misunderstood my request,
By integration of Umbrello into Gideon, I mean the possibility of embedding Umbrello features into Gideon and not a merge of the two projects.

The new architecture on Gideon based on Kparts framework enables this much more easily than before. Basically Gideon is a container for its "parts"
A part is something like a plugin but with a widget, the core of gideon  manages plugins registry and layout of their widgets.
the other big "Kpart" application is Konqueror

>From my user point of view, I'd like to give you some reasons of considering such an "integration"
1. You are now full part of the Kde Project, Umbrello is into KDE CVS. Interoperability between applications is a goal and the reason of "Kparts"
2.It's a way to bring back to Kdevelop
3.You will immediatly increase the number of users of Umbrello
4. The Kdevelop classwizard is very good, but when you want to redesign , you have to cancell all your stuff by hand. It's simply not a CASE Tool....
5. Roundtrip would be easy


>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.

I totally agree with you

>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.

it does, there is a "static" view which give you only inheritance relationshps

>to sum up, i think that IDE's will be obsolete - at least in their current 
>form sometime in the not-so-distant future. from the other side of the 
>argument, we have CASE tools - like UML modeler's and such.

>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.

>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 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.

what you are talking about is still an IDE, which would be "design-oriented"....

>as for Umbrello and Gideon - i don't see it happening - certainly not for 1.x. 
>if somebody wants to adapt the design for 2.0 to support roundtrip 
>engineering, its all them - as long as it doesn't break the design for the 
>rest of the application and doesn't steer umbrello away from what we want it 
>to be.

I'd like to look at this issue....

Bye Simon,



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