I decided to join a group of fellow mISVers in the 30-day product challenge. Differently from most of the other entries, which will go from product idea to release in 30 days, the TextUML Toolkit has been in development for quite a while now, so my challenge will be to finally ship the first release of the product.

The challenge starts on June 1st. Watch this space for frequent updates as I make progress towards the elusive version 1.0.

Rafael

Up until now, the TextUML Toolkit tutorial had been the only piece of documentation available on the TextUML notation. Well, not anymore. I just finished writing some reference documentation on the notation on the wiki. Since I was already at it, I also created a few topics on UML 101 with TextUML (also on the wiki), taking the text from some posts I have written on the topic.

Any issues or suggestions for the documentation are most welcome.

Rafael

M4 has been declared. If you got the M4 test build that was announced a week ago, no need to download again, it is the same build. Please see that post for a summary of the changes.

The TextUML tutorial has been updated in order to reflect the changes that happened during M4, the most remarkable one being that starting with M4 there are no built-in packages (such as ‘base’ and ‘base_profile’) any longer, other than those defined in UML2 itself. So if you were using elements defined in those built-in packages, you have now to define the elements yourself. The rationale is that the TextUML Toolkit should not be in the business of providing built-in packages nor rely on anything other than standard UML to do its work.

If you didn’t get the test build, go ahead and download M4. If you want to see a feature in the TextUML Toolkit, now it is the time to ask, as the next milestone will be feature freeze. And if you have tried the Toolkit and decided it is not for you, we would die to know why. Your feedback is greatly appreciated.

TextUML is a textual notation for UML. The TextUML Toolkit is an Eclipse-based IDE-like tool for creating UML models using the TextUML notation.

Other tools follow the same approach. Emfatic (now an EMFT subproject) has been doing the same for EMF Ecore for a long time; the TMF project aims to be for textual modeling what GMF is for graphical modeling, and will be based on GMT’s TCS and xText components.

Still, people are often puzzled when I explain what the TextUML Toolkit is. A common question is: “if I am going to write code (sic), why do I need UML anyway?“.

Dean Wampler from Object Mentor wrote on his blog a while ago a post entitled “Why we write code and don’t just draw diagrams“. It is a short post, but he presents very good points on why a graphical notation is usually not suficient and is bound to be less productive than a textual one when it comes to modeling details. For instance, on the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words“, Dean wrote:

“What that phrase really means is that we get the ‘gist’ or the ‘gestalt’ of a situation when we look at a picture, but nothing expresses the intricate details like text, the 1000 words. Since computers are literal-minded and don’t ‘do gist’, they require those details spelled out explicitly.”

Couldn’t have said it better.

I strongly advise you to read the original post in its entirety, but I will leave you with another pearl from Dean’s post (emphasis is mine):

“I came to this realization a few years ago when I worked for a Well Known Company developing UML-based tools for Java developers. The tool’s UI could have been more efficient, but there was no way to beat the speed of typing text.”

Enough said.