Steve Spicklemire wrote:

I've been working out some issues with EMarket, and as a way to 'clear the cruft'.. I decided to bite the bullet and do some more careful object modeling. Other than scribbling on paper, and making up some diagrams that look a little like those from Coad's book on Patterns and Strategies, I've never used any object modeling tools before in my life. Soooo... I downloaded the eval version of ObjectDomain, and I can go for about 5 minutes on a Mac before it crashes, and usually 10 or 15 on Windows before it stops responding to mouse/keyboard input. Save early, save often.. ;->. Sure it's frustrating.... but it seems more workable that ArgoUML which I've had even less luck with.... (What are other folks using? Rose?) anyway after much more time that I would have thought possible I've come up with:

I'm in about the same position as you right now - trying to learn formal object modeling and ZPatterns, so I'm not qualified to say anything about your model or questions... I just want to mention two things that I found: - I didn't find any of the modeling tools you mentioned, or others I've tried, very useful on a Mac (or at all), and I ended up using ConceptDraw, which is a general purpose drawing tool with UML and Coad libraries. - Steve Alexander wrote in a reply to your post:

I think Coad's notation is better and clearer, as it allows you to communicate information about objects and their classes all in one place. Coad's notation is more about showing interactions of objects, whereas UML makes that awkward, and is mostly used for expressing static information about relationships between classes.

Very true, IMVHO. I still find there's a big gap between a Coad model and a ZPatterns implementation, but it's much better than with UML. HTH -- Itai Tavor "Je sautille, donc je suis." C3Works itai@c3works.com - Kermit the Frog "If you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything"