[Zope-dev] UML information

[Alexander Staubo]

You guys at Digital Creations have done UML modeling in the process of
building Zope. Can you recommend any good books or resources on the
topic?

Currently we use Adobe Illustrator for simple component relation
modeling -- really relations between clients and server and internal
components. We have been by Visio, but we feel it's even more of a
hassle, plus it makes truly godawful-looking diagrams (many of our
diagrams ends up on a marketdroid's desk).

The best tool I could ever imagine would be one that allowed both micro-
and macroscopic views of a system. The macroscopic view would show the
system laid out as components, servers and consumers, layers and
relations. The microscopic world would go down to the programming level
to show classes, methods, variables. This wish of mine may seem
simplistic -- I'm not sure exactly how UML is targeted, and what it
offes -- however I think anyone will agree that it would be useful.

Do you have anything enlightening to say about UML, such as:

- Has it helped you design more effectively?

- Or do you use UML more as a documentation tool to _illustrate_ a
design?

- Do you use a UML code generator to buy Python or C skeletons? Do you
think a two-way UML tool [one that let you take the source code
seamlessly back into the UML editor for re-editing] would be useful, or
even viable?

- Does your tool of choice automagically produce HTML?

Anybody else care to chip in?

-- 
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