[Uml-devel] CASE tools and IDEs

[Andrew Sutton]

On Wednesday 29 January 2003 1:02 pm, Carsten Pfeiffer wrote:

> ...

this is going to get way, way OT. there's alot of pros and cons to doing 
things both ways. we'll burn - i mean build - those bridges when we need to 
;)

>
> > 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.

yup. UML also has several profiles that enable domain (or application i guess) 
specific modeling. there's a profile for real time applications, enterprise 
applications stuff like that. that's not really what i'm talking about 
though. there's a UML::Method object related to UML::Operations that allows 
the specification of a method in any language. its actually pretty lame, but 
it does allow implementation specific details to be created for UML.

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

i haven't looked at eclipse in a while. i remember that it wasn't too bad, but 
i seem to remember that almost everything was based on tree views. that's not 
always the most efficient way to present information - which is where a UML 
based IDE would probably excel - assuming its built right.

i say we leave it at this: different tools for different tasks. a good UML 
tool should work to increase program understanding whereas a good IDE should 
work to increase programmer efficiency. or something like that.

andy