Rational-Rose and Python ...

[Boudewijn Rempt]

Warren Postma <embed at geocities.com> wrote:

<...>

> Experiential Question:

> Is anyone else out there jaded about OOP+UML?  See my "rant" for reasons
> why...

> Has anyone thought of a more Pythonic replacement for the visual
> Object/Class/Instance/UseCases/Interfaces Modelling?  I rather think the
> Smalltalk Browser concept could be interestingly applied to python, perhaps
> with a few visual "objects with arrows between them" kinds of touches thrown
> in.  Perhaps wxPython's Object Graphics could be used to draw these. Any
> thoughts?

Well, I've previously had occasion to mention the monumental VB
project I was working on last year until it got canceled. It had all
the buzzwords. Multi-tier, transaction processing, DCOM, object models,
in short, the lot. Over a million lines in Visual Basic. After the crash
the remainder of the team (me and one other developer) determined that
amongst the many things that went wrong was the the whole app had grown
organically, without any design, but with a lot of vision. So we decided
to get some help with designing apps.

Since that time, I've been trying modelling tools and languages, both
for fairly large projects, and fairly small ones. I've come to the
conclusion that I ought to partition my large projects into small ones,
and that for small projects a simple sketch with Dia or Visio of the
class structure and the object structure is enough.

Now that I've made a workable class browser, the first kind of diagram
is almost obsolete, although I'd like to see inheritance trees. I still
want to make something like an object hierarchy browser, but that's too
complicated for now.

I sum, I think that an IDE which offers a class browser, an object
browser, a simple diagramming tool, an editor that allows rich text
comments and hyperlinks in the source, and a decent debugger are all
that's needed. Basically, give me many views of the source, and I'm happy.

<...>


-- 

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.valdyas.org