Well, things are not going so smoothly in TextUML Toolkit land. Hope the others are doing better.

• a user reported that the embedded Graphviz install was not working for him on Windows XP (I expected it to work on all Windows versions, but really tested only on Vista). After some investigation, I realized that a minimal Graphviz install will look very different depending on the Windows version. Result: I decided to quit bundling Graphviz for Windows. Now, the TextUML Toolkit users on Windows have to manually install Graphviz on their own, and configure the location of an external Graphviz manually, just as Linux and Mac OS X users had to do since day 0. The latest build RC2 (just published) already reflects that change.
• a simple Wordpress migration using GoDaddy’s Hosting Connection became a big hassle (their rollback feature did not work either). Result: had to delete my existing install, and install the latest version from scratch (thankfully, Wordpress export/import features worked like a charm). Lesson learned: avoid doing any infrastructure changes that are not critical in the weeks preceding a release (even if they seem harmless).

I finally woke up to the fact I am really late with most of the deliverables I planned for June 30th and we are already a week from the deadline. I decided thus to postpone all non-product related items. Other than any critical bug that might be found this week, I will be focusing on publishing the sample application on the wiki. Nothing else.

Well, maybe some blogging.

I finally figured out what was preventing me from exporting the product from Eclipse and worked around the problem. So the TextUML Toolkit RC1 is finally available for download, 4 days after planned.

It turned out the issue that was blocking me was not specific to Eclipse 3.4 RC3. Still, I decided that, until the end of the 30-day challenge, I will continue to use 3.3 to avoid any further surprises. I intend to go back to 3.4 shortly after that.

Another important task that was planned for the first phase (first two weeks) and I have yet to address is the sample application (models + templates). That means some of the less critical work items planned for the second phase will have to be postponed (probably the artwork item).

Even though I am behind schedule, I am really happy to be moving forward again…

(To my fellow 30-dayers: It has been a while since my last post in the 30-day challenge category - at least if you think of how brief it is. But worse, I am also behind the schedule. My goal was to have the first release candidate on the 15th. It is the 17th and I am not quite there yet. Read on for details)

Every now and then, the Eclipse Project goes through quite significant changes (OSGi and RCP in 3.0, P2 now in 3.4). And when the platform moves this fast, everybody living above feels it. New features are not well documented or are not very stable. Tooling for plug-in developers lags behind. Things that used to work before, are now broken.

That is really hard to avoid, even though backward compatibility with the previous release is a hard requirement for the Eclipse Project. I was part of the Eclipse Platform Core team in 3.0 (shipped in 2004) and even though we were having lots of fun with the move to OSGi and the birth of Equinox, it was a lot of work having to implement the new functionality and at the same time make sure all the existing use cases continued to work. And, as usual, some corner cases we missed were only discovered close to the release date, or even right after, when most people will finally migrate from the previous release. Many of the OSGi-aware features were only exposed by the plug-in development tooling in the subsequent releases. And even though we felt like all that backward compatibility effort was draining a lot of our time and energy, users would still get mad at us for introducing regressions, when they didn’t really give a damn about OSGi or RCP.

In hindsight, it is clear that all that work paid off when you look at the impact that OSGi and RCP had in the growth of Eclipse way beyond the realm of IDE frameworks. People are using Eclipse as a platform for embedded and server-side applications, or rich client applications you could swear were native. OSGi itself had a boom in adoption (and features) since when it was adopted in Eclipse and moved from niche technology into the mainstream.

I am sure the same is going to happen with P2, probably in smaller proportions (given its scope). We will be taking its features for granted two years from now, and the pain of change will have been long forgotten. And the good people developing P2 know that. But, this time around I am…

…on the other side of the fence

The plan of shipping TextUML Toolkit 1.0 (scheduled for June 30th) on top of Eclipse 3.4 (scheduled for late June - yes, that should have raised a flag) proved to be quite a challenge. I have had minor problems with the latest Eclipse SDK milestones, which I could work around, but more recently I have faced more serious, blocking issues. And even the non-blocking problems and difficulties, which are just time wasters, grow in importance when you are in a tight schedule.

So I stepped back and decided to and develop and ship the TextUML Toolkit 1.0 on Eclipse 3.3, which was last year’s release. It was not an easy decision, as I will be missing many improvements and fixes (some of them to pretty significant issues) made in the UML2 and EMF components, which are the main requirements. But at least I should be able to move forward in a more predictable pace, and be more confident I have a chance of meeting the June 30th deadline, even if quality might suffer. On the bright side, thanks to backward compatibility, the same update site should still work with 3.4, so users using the Update Manager/P2 in Eclipse 3.4 should be able to install the TextUML Toolkit features, and get better performance and stability.

What makes me feel good is that backward compatibility continues to be one of the Eclipse key values (e4 rumors aside), so regressions receive high priority and are fixed as quickly as possible. The least we (end-users and product providers) can do is to diligently report them.

Contrary to my original intention of working this week on code generation and the sample application, I have been doing some improvements in the graphical visualization of UML models in EclipseGraphviz. EclipseGraphviz (a spin-off of the TextUML Toolkit) is an open source component (EPL) that integrates Graphviz into Eclipse, and among other things, can generate UML class diagrams from Eclipse UML2 models on the fly.

After fixing a couple of bugs, I decided to add a preference page to give some level of control over the way the diagrams are laid out. Here is what it looks like:

You can now turn on or off several adornments such as association end names, multiplicities and membership. For example, this diagram was rendered using the options shown above:

Whereas the following one was rendered for the same model while having only the “Create constraints for association navigability” option checked:

As you can see, enabling constraints based on association navigability can significantly alter the diagram layout. One good reason for enabling that option is to avoid diagrams that grow too much horizontally (as Graphviz will put all nodes of the same rank on the same row), but I personally prefer the former layout.

Side note: I considered dropping the graphical visualization feature altogether for 1.0, as I see it as just a nice to have, and am not totally happy with the quality of the diagrams generated by Graphviz. But every bit of feedback I got for the TextUML Toolkit was that the graphical visualization was really nice, so I changed my mind. But unless serious bugs are found in this area, I have no plans of touching the EclipseGraphviz code again until after I complete the 30-day challenge.

Side note #2: I expanded the FAQ to cover the issue of notation choice and the role of EclipseGraphviz in the TextUML Toolkit.

Took a first stab at creating the model for the sample application for the TextUML Toolkit. As I wrote here before, the sample application is derived from Sun’s Java Pet Store application. Take a look at the models, and let me know how the textual notation feels.

It is late and I am tired, so it is very likely I have made at least a few mistakes (well, not syntactic ones, as the tool tells me about those). Of course, when I start working towards generating the code from the models, I am sure any mistakes I made will quickly emerge.

Cheers,

Rafael

M5 is now available. You can download a self-contained product install, or use the Eclipse update mechanism for adding the TextUML Toolkit to your Eclipse SDK (3.3 or 3.4), on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. Please see instructions on the download page.

This milestone was mostly about bug fixing (including a performance bug), but it also included a minor architectural change: graphical visualization is now optional, and supports different implementations.

This is the list of bug fixes:

As I mentioned before, I joined the 30 day product challenge with the TextUML Toolkit. Of the benefits of being part of the challenge, the ones that most attract me are the sense of being part of something greater, and the motivational power of peer pressure (even if imaginary) and fear of public failure. With that in mind, these are my commitments for the challenge:

Phase 1 - June 1st to June 15th:

Focus on finishing development and examples.

• publish the milestone 5 of the TextUML Toolkit (M5) (done)
• making UML graphical visualization an optional component (done)
• publish an example application
  • model - probably a subset of the Java Pet Store app
  • code generation templates - probably using Acceleo
• should target Eclipse 3.4 (done - M5 can be installed on Eclipse 3.4 or 3.3, but download will continue to bundle 3.3 due to lack of tool support for product creation in the new software update mechanism available in Eclipse 3.4)
• bug fixing (continuously)
• improve documentation (continuously)
• publish Release Candidate 1 on June 15th
• development freeze

Phase 2 - June 16th to June 30th:

Focus on polishing and getting it out of the door.

• major/critical bugs
• minor bugs/polish items
• improve documentation (continuously)
• artwork
  • icons for TextUML source files, new project wizard (outsource)
  • website (images, skins)*
• legal stuff
  • make sure we comply with all licenses for any bundled open source software
  • legal notices using Eclipse branding
  • beef up license (no redistribution, no reverse engineering)
• PR (go easy, this is 1.0) - EPIC, announcement-friendly developer forums
• one active beta-tester
• one early adopter*
• screencasts (this is a biggie)
  • creating a UML model using the TextUML Toolkit
  • generating code using Acceleo
• RC3 on June 29th
• declare 1.0 on Monday June 30th

* marks nice-to-have items

There you go. You, my readers (yes, both of you), can now hold me accountable if I fail to accomplish any of the work items I committed to do above.

To my fellow 30-dayers: good luck to us all. It will be fun!

There was a recent thread about UML on Slashdot, as a reaction to this blog post . The headline: “Is UML Really Dead, Or Only Cataleptic?“. Many posters are clearly bitter towards UML. There seems to be a strong preference for using UML as a communication tool as opposed to as a basis for partial or full code generation (see post on UML modes). Many also complain that the graphical notation is cumbersome and that it hurts productivity (+1!). A few actually like UML; however, it is said that the UML specification is vast and complex and that you should pick the parts of UML that make sense for your case/goals (+1 here too).

Lots of interesting points, but the most negative posts are just misinformed. But that is Slashdot, what should I expect? Java and Eclipse have, in general, a poor receptivity on Slashdot, so I guess UML is in good company.

Of course, while I disagree with those that ditch UML because it was not properly employed in some project they worked, I strongly agree with the complaints about UML (graphical) diagrams being cumbersome and hard to deal with, as I have written here before. But that is not a problem with UML per se, but with the fact most still see it as a graphical language.

UML certainly has its share of problems (design by committee, no reference implementation), but I strongly believe it is very useful and that there isn’t anything out there (I am talking to you, home grown DSLs) that can replace it as the lingua franca for model-driven development.