[Uml-devel] Why you should use Umbrello UML Modeller

[Andrew Sutton]

On Sunday 27 July 2003 01:34 pm, Jonathan Riddell wrote:
> Discuss and comment.
>
> http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/view/74

good announcement. i wish i could afford the ticket or the time :) in order 
for OS projects to succeed, the need fresh developers - sometimes fresh 
maintainers - and that gives us the need to communicate our ideas about the 
software. in many (and particularly older) systems, we've had to learn about 
the design from the code - and that really sucks. if we're lucky, there's 
comments. if we're really lucky, there's good comments and doxygen or javadoc 
or kdoc information. sometimes that isn't really enough. its not always easy 
to see the forest through the trees - or in this case, the design through the 
code or the api reference.

where uml really comes into play in open source probably isn't design so much 
as it is programming understanding - i.e. maintenance or evolution or 
whatever you want to call it. i think that open source projects will continue 
to be built the way they have been for years: code first, design later.

so far, uml hasn't seen too many inroads or adoptions by the open source 
community. its an interesting question and one that i think has to do with 
process. i don't think it will be successful within open source until we can 
do something really cool with it - and that means kdevelop. i don't mean 
integrating with kdevelop so much as building a model-driven backend for it 
(like replacing the class store and project management information). that 
should get it a little more visibility and hopefully usage.

if that works, then there's some interesting possibilities out there.

wow... that's some pretty positive feedback so far (sarcasm abounds). except 
for the one about the pints. come on, we're just making an electronic version 
of bar napkin drawing anyway, right :)

the first guy clearly has very limited knowledge of uml.

the second guy apparently seems to think that the kdevelop class store is 
somehow equivilant to the uml data model. truth be told, a real uml data 
model implementation could be a perfect replacement for the class store 
because it could also be used to contain other modeled information as well 
such as the file system abstraction (uml artifacts) or the build-time 
configuration (component views) or installation requirements (deployment 
views).

andy