[Uml-devel] usability suggestions

[Stefan Seefeld]

hi there,

I'v just had a look into umbrello again after some months.
It looks quite promising !

Do you plan to expose an API to the user for extensibility ?
I'v used other uml modelers before (magicdraw notably), and
some things I'v always been missing are custom actions that
can be plugged into the application, such as custom data
exporters (in the simplest case a callback that can run custom
xslt stylesheets on the document).
I'm mostly working with docbook, and I usually include uml
diagrams in svg and png format, so a method that exports a
diagram to svg and png with a single command would be convenient.

Do you have plans to provide some hooks for custom scripts
(python, xslt, etc.) to be plugged in ? I'd love to be able
to generate a docbook document with embedded svg/png images
with a single click !

A similar approach could be taken for the other direction:
Parsing source code could be made more flexible if custom
parsers could be added. I'm myself working on the synopsis
framework (http://synopsis.fresco.org), so at some point
I could imagine to use synopsis to feed some annotated AST
into umbrella with parsed comments ala doxygen and all the
other jazz...

Just some food for thought.

Best regards,
		Stefan