[Uml-devel] GSoC idea

[Rafael Fernández López]

Hi all,

I am not an Umbrello developer, and I'm not suscribed to this list, so please, 
if you need to ask me something or you say something I should read, please CC 
me the mail :)

First of all, Umbrello is a great app. I like it very much, it has strong 
points, and it could be improved at other points. With those points improved 
it can be a really amazing app.

As I see today Umbrello, it is a nice way of modelling with UML. As we know (I 
have a subject at University in which we learn UML and OCL), UML is not 
always enough, and as I see it, on Umbrello is when we use the "Note" tool, 
for writing OCL statements.

My university is developing in Java (it is not free software :-() an 
application for UML and OCL modelling (it also lets you model with 
SecureUML). Its strong point is without any doubt its ability of letting you 
add preconditions, invariants, postconditions to methods and methods, of 
course, but not only the method definition. Here I explain better:

The application is called MOVA [1]. It uses Maude [2] (GPLv2) for the logic. 
This is very nice because you can have classes (with attributes and methods), 
but you can define a method with OCL, and in your object diagram ask for a 
certain method of an object. So to say:

class Dog
int age
bool amIOld();

And you can define amIOld as an OCL expression, for example: "self:Dog.age > 
8".

Later, in your object diagram, you can have:

Bobby       Doggy
age = 5     age = 10

As I have no access to the source code of MOVA, I guess that the application 
should build some kind of file that Maude understands, and later behind the 
scenes asks Maude for a reply.

Of course: Bobby.amIOld() == false and Doggy.amIOld() == true.

Their application directly shows a terminal with the reply of Maude.

Of course inside OCL expressions you can also call to other OCL expressions, 
recursive OCL calls, etc.

I really think Umbrello would be just amazing with this feature too. If I had 
free time for making things like this apart from kdelibs and kdebase I would 
give it a try (maybe even as a GSoC student), but I'm afraid I've enough 
coding on kdelibs and kdebase :)


[1] http://maude.sip.ucm.es/mova/
[2] http://maude.cs.uiuc.edu/


Bye,
Rafael Fernández López

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