File Formats (was SVG)

[Aaron Trevena <tj droogs org>]

I have to point out that I like the Dia XML as it is. After all compare
the abundance of tols for creating and parsing it against those for
argouml or kivio.

Dia was using XML well before it became a key technology, and SVG was used
significantly.

Seperating presentation and information as Dia does now is a real plus -
have a look at the adbomnination that is argouml's xml file format and you
will see why you don't use something like SVG to represent UML and other
diagrams.

I thought it would be relatively easy to convert to/from Dia and Argouml,
given they both use XML to represent UML Class diagrams - its the same
information, the structures can't be that different, right? wrong!

It contains wonderful nuggets of bad xml like putting coordinates in a
description string (i.e. a description element that contains a string
which contains the description and some coords, fugly!) or putting
seperate data like the name and the type of an attribute into the same
string.

On the subject of SVG and shapes tho - do we have a 'stencil' or set of
shapes for databases yet? at the moment autodia is using class diagrams
and it would be nicer to have something more database specific so that you
know that a foreign key or constraint or whatever will always be
represented in the same way and therefore reliably parsed?

cheers,

A.

p.s. Autodia 1.5 pre-release 2 is now available, with added Dia
(now both as input and output), VCG, GraphViz, SQL and DBI handling as
well as a bunch of fixes.

-- 
Aaron J Trevena - Perl Hacker, Kung Fu Geek, Internet Consultant
AutoDia --- Automatic UML and HTML Specifications from Perl, C++
and Any Datasource with a Handler.     http://droogs.org/autodia