From: Anthony Pfrunder [mailto:s341625@student.uq.edu.au] Sent: 20. oktober 1999 05:39 To: Alexander Staubo Cc: Zope-dev (E-mail) Subject: (slightly offtopic): [Zope-dev] UML information

"Slightly offtopic"? Hah! Please kindly step outside, Sir... I'll show you off-topic! <wham!> :)

You may wish to look at StarOffice (that really cool piece of free software from Sun). I've just completed modelling a robotics navigation system in it and it rocks! It has the connector things from Visio and gives you lots of options to make them look pretty. You can also assign objects to pictures so that when you click on it you can zoom in. It supports OpenGL pictures of objects (rotating etc) to keep your pet marketdroid happy.

Actually, you don't need to sell me on StarOffice at all -- I started using it last week, and so far I'm very, very impressed with it. It's the end to Microsoft's office-suite hegemony as we know it, no kidding. I own Office97 and I have thrown it out, all except for Outlook 2000, whose email features StarOffice simply cannot replace right now -- but someday it might, at least if I get the time to study the source code when it's released. ;) (While StarOffice's email client is also impressive from a certain technical viewpoint, it's like a nightmare edition of Netscape Messenger -- buggy as hell, no mail folder support, and its mail database is dirt slow -- every time you switch to the Inbox it populates it with messages, one by one. With tens of thousands of messages, it takes 5-10 seconds. Constrast that to Outlook, which populates any of my Exchange-resident folders faster than I can say "Zope".) How's that for off-topic?

If you place the diagrams in either StarWriter or StarPresent then you can export directly to HTML+GIF files (with frames for navigation).

When I said HTML export, I meant exporting the model as multiple, browsable HTML files, just like Jim has done with his UML files (see the tech documentation on the Zope site). It's not about graphics, it's about information. That's why, while I like StarOffice's Visio-like drawing capabilities a lot, I don't find it any better than, say, Illustrator.

It doesn't have the official UML symbols but it is child's play to make them (and when you bind 'em together you can still edit the text).

Again, the point with UML is not the graphical representation, but the logical one.

For an "official" UML tool check out dia at your favorate GNOME application portel. Dia gives you all the UML symbols and explicit support for what appears to be UML standard (disclaimer: I've never used full UML myself). It is alpha so it may not suit your needs. However, since it supports XML as its file format a little Zope magic will provide you with web output.

Sounds good. Let me guess... Runs under X? Java? Doesn't run on Windows? If the answer to any of those questions was "yes", please rule me out.

PS: Let me know if you find a good introduction to UML modelling. Lets hope its not Z-like (Z is a horrid specification language I have to use)

If it's anything like ASN.1, you have my deepest sympathies.

Cheers,

Anthony Pfrunder

-- Alexander Staubo http://www.mop.no/~alex/ "Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom smashers and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws." --S. J. Perelman