[Uml-devel] Various responses to various things ....

[Brian Thomas]

On Wednesday 12 March 2003 07:11 pm, JR wrote:
> 1.2 is being released with KDE 3.2.  Nobody knows when that is, but it'll
> be several months away.  I'd just hack away.

	Ok. 

	I have some other work to do before I start this. Perhaps by next week. I'd expect
	at least a week o' hackin time to get this in place.

On Wednesday 12 March 2003 07:11 pm, luis wrote:
> ok, I know with the current code base it is really difficult to try to 
> straight things up at once, but at least new code / code modifications should 
> try to clean the design a bit (unless we think it's just not worth it to 
> spend so much time in it and we want to "just get it working for now" and 
> wait for Umbrello2, where the UML implementation will more or less force it)

	Well, my philosophy is a pragmatic one:  I only want to push for changes to the code to make
	my job (the one I get $$$ for) easier to do (I use umbrello to support a number of projects
	Im involved in). Code generation is at the core of the functionality of Umbrello that I need, so
	thats where my efforts focus. Since umbrello 2.x isnt really "good for anything" at the moment, 
	that means I only want to hack on the "stable" Umbrello 1.x code. Of course, I'd hope that lessons 
	learned on the 1.x hacking will get folded into Umbrello2. 

	So I agree that making fundemental changes to the Umbrello 1.x code is not optimal. An example of 
	some crappiness I see in 1.x are the datawidget classes, but since they dont impact my ability to
	improve the code generation, I'll leave that dragon for someone else to slay. On the flip side, I am 
	willing to roll up sleeves for fundemental change when absolutely needed: an example here is the
	big  change the UMLConcept/UMLClassifier code (BTW, thanks for the better naming Jonathan) 
	so that UMLInterfaces would be passed along to the code generators. 

	I do think it would be good to have a style guide for the Umbrello project (*gasp* is there one that I missed?
	I hope my code is compliant if so!! Someone let me know..). This guide should outlay not only indentation
	practices, but also whether or not you can initialize in the constructor declaration (I hope not!! an init() method
	call is much perferable!!) and other such things including nameing schemes etc. I think lack of consistent
	style is what has made it a relatively steep learning curve for me to get involved in the project.  

	And speaking of my future coding intentions, I have the following on my plate for the 1.2 version of Umbrello:

	- improve Java, XMLSchema, C++ and Perl code generation as needed.
	- make a UMLAssociationRoleMultiple class that tightly controls information about Role A,B multi values.
	- add in template driven codegeneration for all code generators.

	(whew). Of the above, I think only the template code generation will involve major hacking, but we'll see :)


On Wednesday 12 March 2003 07:11 pm, JR wrote:
> Fear not Luis, it all makes sence, I hope.  I added UMLCanvasObject last week.

	Well, I have to agree with Luis here.. "UMLCanvasObject" isnt an intuitive name for something which has no widget
	information. Perhaps the operations/attributes of UMLCanvasObjects may suggest a better name? Since they
	all have associations, perhaps a new name could be "UMLObjectWithAssociations". It should be an abstract
	class too (I didnt check to see if it is currently abstract or not tho..)

								-b.t.