On 30/04/2013 23:45, Bert Verhees wrote: > >> >> Michael van der Zel at Results4Care put together a great little >> plug-in for Enterprise Architect > > > Stupid product, EA, cannot be used in an environment based on > international standards, but is even when used on Mac of Linux > depending on Internet Explorer and Microsoft Database Access > Extensions. Probably to lazy to develop their products in a > vendor-independent way. > > If in this way EA gets the status of preferred third party tooling for > modeling in OpenEhr context, I think, that it is a very bad evolution. >
Hi Bert, we're not in the business of endorsing UML products, but the UML situation is always murky. In theory anyone should be able to share models saved in XMI format. Historically that never worked - each tool's XMI was broken in different ways, the XMI specification itself is unclear and vastly over-complicated (as is the underlying meta-model for UML). So let's say the openEHR community would like some proper computable UML models... what do we do? The most recent attempt was done in a tool called BOUML <http://bouml.fr/>, which was free and is now a pay-for tool (about EUR50). It output generation of XMI and code is superior from what I can work out and it has good support. So I took the work of Eric Browne who built most of the RM in that tool, finished it (more or less) and you can see the XMI files online in the GitHub reference-models repository <https://github.com/openEHR/reference-models/tree/master/models/openEHR/Release-1.0.2/UML>. This XMI file was used as the original input to EA, which more people seem to use, in CIMI, and it nearly worked. There were some errors, and the BOUML vendors fixed that very quickly. EA's XMI import was the main problem however, but to their credit, Sparx also made fixes to improve it in the last 12 months. I think the Rational tool was also able to import this XMI. So it appears that we are getting closer to XMI becoming a trustworthy format, and if we continue to publish an XMI file from a reliable tool, and put pressure on vendors whose XMI doesn't work (along with everyone else in the world who is in a similar situation), the various tools should eventually converge on being able to talk the same XMI. I think that's about the best we can do. Do you have other suggestions? - thomas BTW I will regenerate the online XMI with the latest BOUML tool. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/pipermail/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20130501/325234f1/attachment.html>
