Extending Dia as UML IDE

[Daniel Wimpff <dani wimpff de>]

Dear List,

I'm new here and I've used dia for a while to generate sql.
Sorry for my first post to take some space...

For quite a while now, I'm carrying an idea around that would extend Dia
to a full UML IDE (without adding very huge 'load' to the existing
application).
I'd love to implement myself, but being unexperienced regarding C
development, I better post it here, though the idea is quite simple and
probably envisioned before by many others.

At the moment, to integrate dia in your application development, you
would
1. engineer UML using dia,
2. use a different tool to generate program source code from the
dia-xml,
3. Switch to an IDE continuing the code there.

If class layout changes during coding, the step parsing edited code to
generate UML is just painfull, since code in common can look quite
differently.

If dia would handle the source code itself, too, all would be much
simpler! Since only one direction needs to be supported: dia -> code.
And all needed for this would be the following:
* To edit source inside dia, an inline editor is added.
* A little button on the UML class-widget, to open all source code of
this class in the inline editor.
* A little button next to each method on the UML class-widget, to open
the source of this method in the inline editor.

Should-haves of the inline editor:
a) Conflicts between inline source editor vs. dia UML editing should be
devided sharply.
For example, class attribute and method definitions, etc. are done in
dia as currently known.
You can't change method names, parameters etc. in the inline editor (so
you don't need to parse source code, to generate UML).
b) The inline editor has to save the source code inside of dia's XML
representation of the UML-diagram.
The XML would get some new elements like <methodsource>code
here</methodsource> to contain source code.
c) programmer support features like syntax highlighting. Probably an
existing editor needs to be integrate in some way.
d) Maybe add a new element on UML-level representing 'main' (meaning a
scripts, not a class) if not existing already.

Imagine moving your mouse to a method name in a dia class-diagram, an
the source of that method pops up in the editor ready for reading and
changing.
I think dia has the potential to become a very productive IDE with those
features.

Maybe I'm too naiv, regarding the problems araising when a nice source
editor is to be integrated. Maybe this is something where dia itself is
totally not targeting at. 

Curious for your feedback,
Daniel