On Saturday, August 16, 2003, at 10:09 am, Ralph Apel wrote:
I have continued experimenting with the doclet idea from http://www.spinellis.gr/sw/umlgraph/
This looks *great*! I've wanted something like this for some time.
With this doclet (or some evolved version of it) the essential design information may be put into each source file in form of javadoc comments.
In a separate javadoc process, with this doclet instead of the default
one, the desing information is converted into .dot graph specifications,
- may be by package
- may be by handier sets of related classes
Dot files are practically platform independent and may be easily converted into a large variety of bitmap or vector formats. There are even cgi-frameworks for doing this.
So the idea would be to generate the dots within the normal build process (its fast) and leave the real visualization to each one.
The decisive question is whether we will be willing and able to get the corresponding javadoc-comments into the sources. I will try to send a more concrete (and small and compressed!!) example on some area I haven't selected yet.
Certainly the usage of special doclets can be extended to generating XMI
files to be directly loaded into the different UML-Tools. Indeed I
expect some code there around doing this. Of course it might not be too
easy, because there are several specs and dialects of XMI (XML Metadata
Interchange) and the support of XMI by the different tools also varies
wildly.
Wrapping this up as a Maven plugin would rock! Then anyone could use this on any Maven related project. Adding some javadoc tags as hints to create better diagrams is a good idea too.
I'd really like us to auto-generate some good UML diagrams from our code - it'd really help folks grok the code. One thing though is that UmlGraph depends on Graphviz - which may not be installed on a users computer - so we'd probably want to make the UML generation and optional step for those who have Graphviz installed. Other than that, this looks great stuff.
James ------- http://radio.weblogs.com/0112098/
