Learn Something - Catching up on Software Development and Other Things

Star UML 5.0 (Stable Release) - Looks good, but one very weird feature?

2006-01-09T22:33:00.000-05:00

The official, stable, 5.0 version of StarUML was released at the end of December. I finally got around to installing it and using it for a little while today.

Immediately noticeable improvements:
- Can no longer accidentally close the workspace window, which was not re-openable in beta versions
- Can add cardinality on relationship lines. Previously had to use properties pane (unless I was just never clicking in the right place).

Weirdness:

- Upon creating a new class, I get a person’s name for the class name. If I ever need a class named 'Jung, Yoontae' then I'm all set. I see this in the release notes:

[New Feature]
- Shows the name of contributors as initial name of element when creating
elements. (Issue #17)

Can that mean what I think it means? This is a feature?

- I still cannot add diagram from diagram explorer. Need to be in model explorer. Maybe this is by design?

I noticed that the windows installer is almost twice the size of the beta version. I'm surprised to see this much more bulk between a beta and a final release of something. The new installer is about 22MB in size.

So instead of just talking to myself about all of this I guess I'll post these items as questions to their discussion forum.

Sticking with StarUML.... (for now)

2005-12-17T14:50:00.000-05:00

StarUML is holding up well for me. I imported my existing code - about 500 java classes which implement the core of our application - and StarUML handled this without a problem. Also, this product seems to do a little more than I expect at first glance. For example, I initially thought that you couldn't put cardinality on the ends of transition lines in a state diagram. By clicking on a line, the UI didn't present an obvious way to specify this. After a while, I noticed that you can choose to display a properties pane, in which you can specify this. I've seen a couple of other parts of the app like this - things that were possible which I thought weren't because the UI sort of obscured things. Its nice to find additional features in a product after you've given up on looking for them. The fact that the features are there are signs of a strong product. The UI can always be refined later. Also, the the StarUML support forum looks like a reliable place to get help. I just noticed that somebody asked about and received a fast answer on another UML capability that I thought was missing - return messages on a sequence diagram.

I'm thinking that this tool is the way to go until I come up with some show-stopper limitation or bug. The bugs I've seen so far are probably very fixable, while the truly important UML diagram features that I need exist in the product.

More UML...

2005-12-06T23:39:00.000-05:00

After some more time spent in Poseidon UML, I'm going to give StarUML another try. I imported about 500 classes into my Poseidon UML model. Although I have only two, simple, class diagrams so far, I'm having trouble opening the file. And when it does open, it takes a prohibitive amount of time to save it. I'm running this on Java 1.4.2 and I have bumped up the memory allocation. Also, the flexiblity of the UI is getting in the way a little bit. Its a little too easy to create new, unneeded classes in class diagrams when trying to connect existing classes in a diagram, or move classes around.

StarUML also has its issues, but there are forums which indicate that they are being addressed. I'm surprised that there isn't more activity in the forums. I ran into the issue where you can no longer open new or existing diagram windows. This one pushed me towards Poseidon. This bug means you can't really do anything, but the fact that there's a discussion about it and an indication that it will be fixed in the next release.

Looks like I'll spend a couple of more hours using StarUML, assuming I can avoid the bug mentioned above.

And if I move back to Poseidon, I'll keep the number of elements in a single project relatively small.

Both products are strong enough to keep me from wanting to go back to Visio.

Low Cost UML Tools

2005-12-04T16:22:00.000-05:00

I'm Looking for a cheap, solid, UML modeling tool. The product must be good at class, sequence, and state diagrams. I've heard good things about Borland's Together product, but it looks like this starts at a few thousand dollars per seat, so I'm exploring the cheap alternatives. I'll keep notes here on my findings. So far, I'm looking at Microsoft Visio, StarUML and Poseidon UML. If ArgoUML had sequence diagrams, I'd give that a try also. Looks like they're planning on getting them in there soon.

Here are some notes on my 3 contenders.

Microsoft Visio (with a free, 3rd party, Visio 2003 UML template)

I've been using Visio with various stencils for a few years now. The built-in UML functionalities of Visio 2000, or maybe it was an earlier version, were a complete nightmare to use. They tried to do too much within the confines of Visio and the result was a cumbersome, unstable, product. A simple stencil or two works much better.
Currently using this with the Pavel Hruby stencil which can be found here.
Using this Visio and this stencil is currently my preferred approach to drawing UML diagrams. I'll default to this if neither of the other tools prove to be stable, quick, and simple to use.
This combo works well, but because it’s a Visio stencil, there’s only so much it can do automatically for you. For instance, when connecting messages to life lines on a seq diagram, this can’t show you the list of possible operations, or add the operation that you enter to the class for that object. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing because with all that extra functionality, there is quite a bit of overhead and complexity with which to deal.

StarUML

Open source, free for commercial use
Code hosted at tigris.org, same place that hosts argouml, which is the core of Poseidon UML.
Was able to reverse engineer – import code, about 500 java source files
Seems like its not trying to do too much on a class diagram, which is a good thing. Attributes and methods can be entered as freeform text, although one at a time.
A little buggy, but seems promising
Sometimes get into a state where I can’t add a new diagram. Eventually, get out of this state but not sure how. Install on home pc is forever in this state – need to reinstall completely.
Having trouble with printing and layout.
Got a mesg line drawn on a seq dgm that I couldn’t click on w/o getting ‘Invalid arguments to create element(s)’ dialog
Will probably put on hold for now until it becomes more stable

Poseidon UML (based on ArgoUML)

I've tried this a couple of times over the past few years and I'll keep giving it a try if no other product can clearly beat it.
In the past, the free edition of Poseidon didn’t allow printing but now it does.
The interface is a little bit, uh, busy, to say the least. eg. Mouse over a class in a class diagram and as many as 8 (or more?) adornments appear which let you do things such as draw associations, create new subclass or superclasses. Takes a little getting used to. Probably makes it quicker to do things when you're comfortable using it. While getting started, its easy to do something wrong, accidentally, because of all the adornments. But its easy to undo these accidents.
Can color text within a class. Useful for highlighting additions, changes to existing stuff.
Looks like there are very detailed options. More so than StarUML.
I assume that this is still based on ArgoUML.
For some reason, I really want this product to work well for me. I like the fact that its Java and will run on non Windows platforms. I also like the model of Poseidon taking an open source product, adding value, and being able to sell it commercially at a low cost.

Also...

An excellent listing of products can be found at Objects By Design.

More UML resource can be found on the OMG's UML site.

Google Maps API

2005-12-01T22:49:00.000-05:00

Started poking around with Google Maps to get a feel for developing an app with it. Its extremely easy to get started and get some basic functionality running. There are tutorial-like articles out there, such as this one from O'Reilly's xml.com, but the API documentation is easy enough to follow that you don't need anything else to get started. The official documentation holds your hand through developing a basic application and provides an API reference on a single web page.

A couple of things that stood out as a little different from regular 3rd party, free, client side APIs. Your code needs to include a key which is tied to the URL of the web page that you've coded, and you need a web server for any sort of development.

To use the API, you've got to obtain a key from Google. This key is based on a google account and the URL up to, but not including, the page name. You can register a localhost URL to do local, desktop, development. I'm using Tomcat on its default port of 8080, so I registered http://localhost:8080/gmaps. I can have any number of pages in the directory that corresponds to this using the same key. Or, you can use a key registered to a named server and play name resolution tricks on your desktop machine to force the name to resolve locally.

Because this is client side javascript, you can learn to use it in an html file. But the key validation requires that the page be served up by a web server. You can't just open the file in the browser directly from the file system. So, you still need a web server. But this doesn't have to be an application server - anything that will server up static html will work.

Also, the terms of use dictate that this only be used for applications that are "generally accessible to consumers without charge." Not sure how the licensing will work for commercial use. Currently, Google reserves the right to place ads in the maps.

Learning from the nephew

2005-11-24T13:50:00.000-05:00

There's a new file sharing program called Grouper. My nephew is using it so it must be useful. His opinion on this: "...pretty cool because you can, um, select who you want to share your files with, create a small file sharing network with your friends and relatives." It looks like its intended for private file sharing but it looks like there are all sorts of groups which makes this easier to share files with people you don't necessarily know.

Why read this blog?

2005-11-20T02:42:00.000-05:00

This is a place where I document and track the relevant, and not so relevant, things I learn on a regular basis. I'm doing this simply for myself, because I need some simple way to record this. Hopefully, anybody who stumbles across this also gets something out of it.

I'm a software architect/developer/designer/user/whatever who has been working pretty much heads down on a product the past few years. This product is a web based app, built on Java and many OSS libraries, including Struts. I've recently picked my head up out of the sand to see what's been going on lately.

A few years ago, we were were staying ahead of the pack by using off the shelf open source libs and products and focusing on developing the true value added parts of the product. But software development has been evolving over the past few years and so I wonder if we were to start building the same product right now, what would we use? What would be the set of tools and techs from which we'd choose?

But we're not starting from scratch, so really I need to look at where we go with the choices that were made.

Of course, this is a never ending process. At times, we lay off the process for a little while, but we'll always need to get back to it.

I expect to be considering, and learning about, new technologies and products in the areas of web application frameworks, user interface, object persistence, and development tools. This might include techs such as Java Server Faces (JSF), Spring, Ruby on Rails, AJAX, and upgrades to the products we currently use. Moving higher up the software stack, I might also be looking at products like MediaWiki and WordPress for collaborative documentation. Are these 'off the shelf' buildling blocks for the sort of apps I need to build? And if not, can they shed light on new ways to implement things, new ways to combine technologies to create new solutions?

And so that's what this blog is about.

Thanks for stopping by.

Syndication (RSS, Atom)

2005-11-17T00:13:00.000-05:00

I'm dipping into syndication a little bit, pretty much just enough to get a fundamental understanding of what it is, when & why to use it, and the tools to implement this. As far as blogger goes, I can very simply add an Atom feed. RSS is not included in the free service, however, it's easy to add an RSS feed using FeedBurner. It only took a couple of minutes for me to add the feedburner feeds in the sidebar.

I'm looking at this from the publishing side of it more so than the user side, which is not a great way to fully understand a technology. I'm also wondering if RSS/Atom feeds are being used internally within corporations, much like other web based technologies are used for internal apps. And what sort of apps - I guess this is mostly used for integration, but I can also see how you'd want to take advantage of off the shelf RSS readers and aggregators. You can publish a feed for your data and users can use the viewer they like best to look at the data.

What are the popular tools to implement this stuff progammatically? I've listed a couple below but didn't spend more than a few minutes searching.

Here's an open source parser, called FeedParser, from the Jakarta Commons project. Also, it looks like the Commons Digester can help turn a feed into java objects.

RSSLibJ is an open source API for generating RSS.

del.icio.us tagrolls and linkrolls

2005-11-16T10:17:00.000-05:00

del.icio.us offers linkrolls and tagrolls. Linkrolls provide a customizeable feed of recent bookmarks, while a tagroll is a feed of your tags.

I really like the user interface for setting up either. On the tagroll setup screen, you're guided through the customizations with familiar ui controls while instantly seeing the effect on your own data. Also, the html is right there for you to copy and paste. A single setup screen works for both new and advanced users.

I'm throwing in my tag roll now and later I'll look to use it to categorize posts.

I had been thinking that I could write some simple AJAX script to pull the feed from delicious and display the tags in the blogger sidebar. But I realized this wouldn't work because of cross domain scripting issues. Its better to have delicious offer this up as a service anway.

Thanks to Freshblog for implementing this on the site. I probably wouldn't have noticed the article had I not seen the tag roll in action.

Even more blogging

2005-11-13T18:20:00.000-05:00

I'm finding that I'm spending more time poking around with customzing this blog than anything else tech related over the past couple of days. FreshBlog is a great source of learning for this sort of thing.

Today, I added a a free SiteMeter counter. This was extremely simple to do. The Sitemeter folks do a good job of offering different ways to get the counter into your web page, from hand holding to just allowing you to copy & paste the HTML and Javascript. At first, I had gone to the 'Site Meter Blogger Installation Instructions' page and was ready to use that to generate the link. I wasn't thrilled about having to use a wizard to do this. Fortunately, they include a note at the bottom of the screen telling you that you don't have to do it this way but instead can just get straight to the HTML, which I think is easier to deal with. Giving the choice from this screen doesn't sound like a big deal, but its a simple and effective UI pattern which apps sometimes overlook.

I saw that FreshBlog was using SiteMeter and so I just went with that. I noticed after the fact that I could have seen a few other choices on the blogger online help page regarding hit counters.

Also, it looks like I can add images to other parts of this page, for instance the sidebar, by uploading the images into a post that I only save as a draft, finding out the URL to the image in that post and then simply using it elsewhere in the HTML.

More blogging stuff

2005-11-12T18:45:00.000-05:00

I've just barely put this blog out there and I'm already getting some comment spam. So today's self-learning lesson involves some ins and outs of having a blog - one of these being comment spam (not sure if this is an in or an out - not sure what the hell that phrase means in the first place).

Blogger now allows comment moderation. I can also force users to type an unintelligible word which appears in an image in order to post a comment, but I think that would be a good way to keep anyone from bothering to comment so I'll avoid that for now.

And I'm going to be checking out FreshBlog for blogging hacks.

Bookmarking with del.icio.us

2005-11-12T10:58:00.000-05:00

Aside from the annoying URL, it looks like del.icio.us is an interesting way to organize bookmarks and keep them stored in a central place. I like the idea of using tags to categorize things - especially the fact that you don't have to limit something to one particular category. It will be interesting to see how the app get's enhanced and refined over time.

I wonder how long it will be before Google or Yahoo or Microsoft purchase them? Or are they already owned by somebody big? I guess I've got to check on that. I can't imagine that this application is going to exist simply for the sake of letting people share bookmarks. Owning the data that they're gathering - the URL's that people keep handy, and how people categorize these URLs is a valuable part of search and targeted advertising. And this is a nice way for delicious to build a database like this - let the users of the web do it for them.

Hmmm... so what else did I learn here? I also learned that you can have javascript URLs in the Firefox bookmarks toolbar.

And I saw a mention that I can use del.icio.us tags to categorized blogger posts. Not nearly as nice as if blogger supported tags directly, but its something.

Don't buy Sony

2005-11-12T10:51:00.000-05:00

What would happen if somebody, some non-Sony employee, tried to walk into the Sony Corporate Headquarters, right past security, and place a listening device in an executive conference room? It would be OK with Sony as long as this person said that its not for malicious purposes right? Yeah, right. I doubt that Sony would have this attitude about it.

Not exactly the sort of thing I expected to include here, and this is already old news for anyone who's paying attention to tech news this week, but Sony really deserves to have their asses handed to them over this rootkit thing. If they don't pay dearly for this, then other companies will be more than eager to do the same. There's info out there on checking to see if you're infected.

Why isn't this trespassing? Or worse - according to this article, you may have to reinstall Windows? If I walk uninvited into a strangers house and reformat their hard drive, can't I get in trouble for that?

The best technical info on this is probably here and here.

Running your own wiki

2005-11-07T00:52:00.000-05:00

My lastest task was to get MediaWiki up and running on a Windows XP desktop. This is the software that powers Wikipedia. Required components include MySQL, Apache, and PHP.

Versions used: Apache 2.0.55, PHP 5.05, MySQL 5.0.15

Installation is pretty easy as long as, like most things, you take some time to read the documentation carefully. I took the approach of browsing documentation, then trying to install things pretty quickly, seeing what problems came up, and then drilling deeper into the docs as necessary.

road bumps:

installed PHP using the windows installer, which does not include the stuff needed to run Wiki Media. Took a closer look at instructions and saw that I needed to use the zip file instead. I wonder if its really worth having the windows installer for PHP. If somebody is going to use PHP, they should be able to handle unzipping the file and following the instructions. If somebody really needs a windows installer for this, then they're probably going to have other troubles getting things up and running. I think it would be less confusing and less work for the PHP folks to just offer the zip file.

The trickiest part was getting Apache and PHP running together. A basic configuration was simple - enough to run a 'hello world php page, but Apache wouldn't run as a windows service and load the php_mysql.dll extension properly. Running the PHP CLI, e.g. c:\>php -i worked fine and showed that the extension was loaded. Also Apache loaded the extension properly if I ran apache.exe from a command prompt. A reboot of Windows seems to have fixed things. Figures. Looks like Apache, PHP & MySQL were all doing their part all along, it was Windows that was having trouble with this.

Creating a blog

2005-11-05T00:05:00.000-05:00

The first entry is the most obvious - creating a blog with blogger. The hardest part is coming up with a unique name. I just realized that many blogs categorize postings. Not sure if blogger does this. If not, then this won't be the best tool for this sort of blog. (I'm already getting sick of the word 'blog' - i think i've used it 45 times in this short post. blogblogblogblogblog.)

If you've gotten here, then you must have already been here.

Looks like WordPress might be a better option.