[Uml-devel] umbrello kpart

[Andrew Sutton]

On Sunday 22 June 2003 02:38 pm, Jonas B. Jacobi wrote:
> Hey ho folks!
> I would like to ask, whether you maybe already thought about or at least
> could think about making umbrello a kpart.
> I am asking this, because i really would like to see(work on) an
> integration of umbrello in kdevelop(gideon) with on the fly switching
> between uml/editor view of the code. If you would do an umbrello kpart, i
> would like to start working on some usability/gui issues in
> umbrello(especially handling of adding/changing operations/attributes etc.
> is less usable than in other uml-tools imho), if not, i will have to work
> on my own part ;).

based on past conversations in this direction, i'm pretty sure that umbrello 
1.x won't actually become a kpart. it wasn't really designed with 
interoperability in mind.

on the otherhand, umbrello2 - which is a ground up rewrite should - to some 
degree - support quite a bit of extensibility toward that goal. i haven't 
really planned for it (not formally), but the whole thing is fairly 
extensible. its also alot more complicated the original version.

u2 is built around a core library that provides all the generic and 
application-specific code. linking against that would be a good start. 
however, there are some other parts of the infrastructure (like the handling 
of the document/view) that currently prohibit what you want to do. if 
somebody can safely rewrite the document/mainwindow code, you should be able 
to write a kpart for it. there's also a fairly complex startup protocol that 
you wouldn't be able to break. i think it would be a fairly difficult task.

oh. and the time it takes to build u2 is prohibitively expensive. depending on 
your computer it could take between 40 minutes (p4 2.8 GHz) to 1.5 hours (p3 
600 MHz). on the other hand,

besides, i've just gotten to the point where i'm trying to write gui code for 
attributes, etc and it turns out that i'm terrible at dialog design :) i'm 
giving up on it for the time being to start putting the diagram framework in 
place.

if you're really interested in persuing this, let me know. i'll give as much 
help as i can.

andy