Re: [Gnome-devtools] What we're doing.

[Mark <jamess1 wwnet com>]

Andrew Sutton wrote:
> 
> that's what i'm talking about! that's good stuff. do we need to work out
> a uml component? i don't think dia really has the capabilities for real
> design level stuff.i was under the impression that it was just a
> drawing tool. i think it would be really cool to have a uml modeler so
> that you can click on an object and go to the code - now that would be a
> nice code browser :) in addition to the other stuff...

Dia has a plugin mechinism, that might be sutible to use. If it is not
possible to do what we want with Dia, I'm sure it would at least be a
good base.

> 
> the mapping of c, c++ to uml can be quite powerful, but i don't know if
> you'd want to use source as a persisting method for uml. it would
> probably be a good idea to save uml specific data to another file (xml).
> this makes syncronization a little harder, but it allows for alot more
> flexibility for language bindings - use a style sheet to generate code?

Yeah, an XML format would be desirable. Dia uses an XML format, and from
breifly looking at one of my class diagrams, I don't see any trouble
with using it. And, as an added bonus the data would be
editable/viewable in Dia. You are right that a design tool should have
it's own data model, ideally this would listen to the source model and
incorperate valid edits. As for code generation, the basic requriement
is that it should recognize existing structure in the source, and make
the minumum number of changes for source to match the model. Style
sheets may be the proper method, I'm not sure, whatever method used
would probably use gpf to recognize existing structure. This is the part
of code generation that currently suffers, from what I've seen (for
example glade).

> 
> i might know somebody who would be willing to design the data model for
> such a component. i think i even might be able to find a couple people
> to work on it :)

That would be very good, as with the other components it should probably
have a corba interface to fit in with the rest of the framework.

Mark