G'day Folks,
A small thought (in a lot of words) from the sidelines to spice up
conversations :)
As a developer of large scale applications (typically 500K lines or
more) one of the wonderful task I have to deal with is project
management and the usual paperwork shuffles of design, requirements
documents etc etc. What this involves is a hell of a lot more than just
a simple UML or ER diagram. There are also many other aspects involved.
Dia, as it stands today, does not cater for this market. What I'm
looking at and trying to find some information on is what development is
going on towards making a larger scale project management type systems,
of which Dia would be one part. For example, I would like a Dia
"project" where I can contain many pages of diagrams. That is, a
collection of UML static blocks, state and activity diagrams on
different pages rather than a single huge one.
Before I go further, I'd like to provide some background into the
thought processes.
I've finally got myself into a company where I can develop full time on
linux after an extended trip in the wilderness over in MS-land. However,
many of the tools there are generally quite useful. As a case in point
Rational is making huge dollars creating an entire environment.
Personally I detest the Rational approach to software development, but
they do provide a good example of potential capabilities. I did all of
the diagramming in Visio and then used HTML for documentation (No code
auto generation). The limitation that I found with this is the ability
to have everything as a collection of projects and sub projects.
One of the elements that I missed from earlier days was the project
capabilities of the early Borland Turbo X Series. The Project management
capabilities of Turbo Pascal/C++ were great from the re-use aspect.
Build up larger capabilities from smaller ones - you could also attach
arbitrary documents anywhere in the hierarchy etc. Note that I am not an
IDE fan, but the projman capabilities in this area were along my ideal
working environment. When the Builder series came out the projman
capabilities went backwards IMHO. Only single level heirarchies
(previously it could be arbitrarily nested) and many other things
disappeared. I would like to have something similar to the original
within the Linux environment.
The sort of tool that I am thinking of would make use of the
componentised architectures already available in GNOME/KDE. Keeping to
the Small Is Beautiful approach, I wouldn't expect Dia to expand to
include project management but more likely a separate Project Management
application that uses Dia as a component (Bonobo if playing the GNOME
game). Naturally there would be integration with CM tools like CVS etc
for the back end of the project.
I'd like to emphasise that this is more at the higher level of the
project as management issues, not build environment (before everyone
jumps down my throat about using autoconf/make and CLIs etc). Naturally
one of the nodes within the project would be the code areas, but I'm
looking at collecting the documentation and code together within a
single graphical front end. Also, I'm not thinking of an MS Project
replacement either, more a style of File Manager but project oriented
and using components. Also, I want to avoid the
Rational/STP/ObjectInsight view of the world that uses the tool as a
forward/reverse engineering system (another personal pet-hate). It
should only provide a list of "documents" and then open the appropriate
component to deal with it.
I've taken a look around the developer sites of GNOME and couldn't see
anything around that resembled this form of functionality. Does anyone
know of work in this area?
--
Justin Couch Author, Java Hacker
Snr Software Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED]
rbuzz.net http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/
Java3D FAQ http://www.j3d.org/faq/
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"Look through the lens, and the light breaks down into many lights.
Turn it or move it, and a new set of arrangements appears... is it
a single light or many lights, lights that one must know how to
distinguish, recognise and appreciate? Is it one light with many
frames or one frame for many lights?" -Subcomandante Marcos
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