The following was sent to me by Michael; I forward with his permission.
Good food for thought.
Holger
-------- Original Message --------
From: "Michael Henderson" <michael..jhenderson.com>
Subject: RE: Modeler vs. consistency of
DataMap/Entity/Attribute/Relationship
To: Holger Hoffstatte <holge..izards.de>
Hi,
I have been lurking on the mailing lists for cayenne for quite a while and
I
looked back through
my mailbox to find the attached posting.
I have been looking at ArgoUML (www.argouml.org) as a platform for writing
a
UI for an open-source O/R mapping tool
(hibernate, OJB, Cayenne).
Here are my resaons:
1. Integration with UML class diagrams - manipulation of diagrams
2. Class model is XML (XMI format) (embedded in a zip archive)
3. Output to image, eps, or SVG
4. Extensible class, attribute information via 'tagged values'
5. Plugin architecture
6. ArgoUML supports UML class diagram generation from source code
and source code generation from UML models
This seems ideal since the O-R modelling can become another stage in the
system modelling process
with representation in an industry standard form. XSLT or Velocity DVSL
can
be used to convert XMI
to the O-R XML file format (all the O-R frameworks I have looked at use an
XML file format).
I have so far created a class diagram in ArgoUML to represent the
Artist/Painting/Gallery entities
in the cayenne tapestry tutorial. with tagged values added to the diagram
elements to represent
items such as table name, primary key, manadatory, column name, column
type,
etc.
It is my goal to create a XSLT stylesheet to convert this model's XMI file
to the datamap.map.xml file
shipped with the example and have it opened in CayenneModeler.
If this works out then a ArgoUML plugin should be possible to make the
editing of the tagged values
less cumbersome.
Would this effort be welcome.? I realize that a great deal of effort has
been expended on the cayenne modeler
application, but if a redesign is being contemplated the above approach
may
offer a viable solution.
Regards,
Mike Henderson
-----Original Message-----
From: Holger Hoffstatte [mailto:holge..izards.de]
Sent: Sunday, March 02, 2003 12:30 PM
To: cayenne-devel
Subject: Re: Modeler vs. consistency of
DataMap/Entity/Attribute/Relationship
Andrus Adamchik wrote:
> I totally agree that Modeler is confusing and hard to modify. I said it
> all along, since I was the first one to feel the pain of the original
> "hit-and-run" Modeler design. A few months ago I grew so desperate with
No hard feelings ;-)
I was just as disappointed to see how useless Swing as an application
framework really is.
> I think we should do a full conversion to Scope (maybe in 1.1 or 1.2). I
> (..snip..)
fully agree, scope seems very helpful. Lots of useful things in there.
> Hopefully using Scope will allow us to get rid of *all* map modification
> events. Scope uses hierarchies of MVC triades and allows event
Um..no, please? What I tried to say in my mail was that I liked the
non-display events like AttributeEvent etc., but that they are simply in
the wrong place (package-wise) where the DataMap itself cannot benefit
from it right now. That's all! It would be so great to have Entity as
AttributeEvent listener, for example. It seems Craig understood what I
meant; messing with the model at runtime has always been a problem with
EOF since there was no way to invalidate the internally cached structures.
> I haven't done the full switch yet (only a few recent panels are
> implemented using Scope), since I feel like Modeler in its current form
> has an acceptable level of quality for the end users and is ready for
> 1.0. I did not want to break it apart and face the task of rebuilding it
> from scratch, thus delaying the 1.0 date further.
I understand that: one of our customers is playing with it and likes it,
even though they will use TopLink 'for real'. But generally reception so
far has been positive already and is probably going to get better for 1.0
(L&F, prefs saving). On the other hand I now spent almost three days
trying to get the rename-entity functionality working and have so far not
yet been able to get it right. Even rebuilding the tree view is really
obscure and doesn't work as expected..maybe I'm just too dumb. :(
> As a downside, I stopped any attempts to optimize events and other
> things till the switch is done. 1.0 is the most important thing now!
OK.
Holger
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