J. Wolfgang Kaltz wrote:
Gregor J. Rothfuss schrieb:
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.
I agree, auto-generated diagrams don't seem to be very helpful without
tweaking the class and association selection and the output.
Creating a diagram of comprehensible size from scratch won't take
much more time.
A while ago I posted some hand-drawn diagrams (digitalized with
a digicam), IMO that's the quickest method and quite helpful.
I could never get used to UML tools - they are more complicated
to use than a pencil and don't add much benefit apart from generating
some mock code.
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.
+1
-- Andreas
<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
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