[Uml-devel] u2 gui design

[Andrew Sutton]

On Monday 05 May 2003 02:39 am, Oliver Kellogg wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Apr 2003 10:49:46 -0400, Andrew Sutton wrote:
> > okay... i've been giving the gui for u2 some thought lately and i think
> > i've figured out what to do with it.
> > [...]
> > in otherwords, its basically kdevelop for modeling.
>
> Wow. This triggers another thought.
> Are you familiar with the kdevelop internals?
> They use a "class store" as the online repository for the
> programming language declarations. Basically the language
> parsers fill the class store.
>
> Couldn't we try to use this class store also for u2?

maybe there's some confusion about uml and source code relationships. uml is 
basically a visual programming language (it really is). the internal storage 
for that IS the AST. besides the "online" aspect of the class store (i guess 
it runs as a service?) i'm not really sure what we'd get from it. besides, 
UML is sufficiently more complicated than the kdevelop, scoped class stuff.


> Just think: We'd get the language parsers for free -
> at the time of writing, this is at least C++, Java,
> Pascal, Ada (with more to come.)
>
> Perhaps the class store would need some augmentation
> for UML specific info - but that shouldn't be a problem,
> the kdevelop code would just ignore those parts.

the best possible thing that could happen would be that kdevelop scrap their 
class store and develop all the parsers and stuff against a u2 UML class 
store. we can track alot more complicated semantics than just code structure 
(which is all they really have to do). of course, their parsers would have to 
become significantly more complicated, being able to pull out "unrecoverable" 
semantics like bidirectional associations and stereotypes :)

> Well, I think integration with kdevelop (at least under the
> hood, not necessarily on the user interface) would be a boon!

not quite ready for it yet. when u2 has resolved its own internal 
requirements, then we might be able to talk. maybe we can start considering 
by the end of the summer.

andy