J. Wolfgang Kaltz wrote:
I'm curious whether you believe UML diagrams can be helpful for - documenting Lenya internals (and if so, do we want to do that) - discussing architectural changes
yes as long as they are kept current, which is easily possible with eclipse UML plugins. maybe we can have a build target for these?
the problem i have found is that a UML diagram of all of lenya is rather large, and needs to be decomposed to be useful.
Frankly, I don't see how any diagram automatically generated from the sources can be helpful. The only thing that can be generated is the class diagram of all of Lenya, and like you said, there are simply too many classes; plus usually you want to explain a certain part, not all at once.
Admittedly, navigating through the Javadocs one can fairly quickly get an idea of the class hierarchy. What is more difficult to grasp is how & when instances are created, and how they interact with each other. I'm hoping sequence diagrams can be useful here.
For the bigger picture, something like component diagrams might be useful.
<philosophy>
To be honest, I haven't been drawing many diagrams since I started working on Web apps, 1999. Before that, I was drawing database designs before actually writing SQL code. The Web has seemed to me a bit like the wild west; code (shoot) first and think (judge) later. Since Web apps are often going new ways, it is often not possible to design the app in advance. But I am sure that it will increasingly be a customer requirement that Web apps too have some form of serious system documentation, after they have been developed. Remember that article on the state of open-source CMS a few months ago ? I understood the conclusion as being this: php-based CMS are more advanced in terms of features; Java-based CMS have the advantage of a sounder system architecture and thus are a better base for future developments. But to prove this (and have a sales argument), that system architecture needs to be documented.
</philosophy>
(...)
Another problem is that it is not only Java classes that are involved, but also Cocoon configuration files (sitemaps), Lenya configuration files, flowscript, ... I don't know how these would fit in in UML diagrams.
that is true, and is a concern for eclipe lepido, the upcoming cooon editor for eclipse which attempts to have a metamodel of cocoon that can describe not just java code, but also these config files.
That indeed looks like an important project for the Cocoon-based development community. The focus seems to be on development tools. Are you aware of efforts to come up with a notation to document Cocoon-based apps ? Meaning, a common notation (tool-free) for things like sitemaps, pipelines, maybe schemes, ...
-- Wolfgang
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
