Python and Visual Programming?? Ideas for a complete python "IDE"

[Nicolas Chauvat]

Hi,

Thomas Weholt wrote :

> On my Linux-box I tried using a program called Dia ( also available for
> Windows ) to create UML-models of the objects I wanted to use. A small
> ...
> convert UML into semi-useful Python-classes too.
> 
> I'm thinking about taking this even further; generate DTD or Schema so that
> my XML-input can be validated, automatic generation of preliminary docs
> ...
> I want feedback or ideas on how we could organize such an effort, if there
> are any interest. I'm not a leader/project-leader kind of guy myself, but
> want to be part of such a project as a developer.
> 
> Any related info is also interesting.

Dia doesn't even come close to a modelling tool. It is a graph drawing
tool that provides ready-to-use UML classes-look-alike boxes. but that's
about it. What's the difference you may ask? Well try doing this with
Dia: create a class, then another that inherits from the first. Then
create another class diagram with the first class (just copy it over ).
Now let's say you copy over the second one. Hey, where did the
inheritence link go? As you've figured out, it never was an inheritence
relationship, it was a 'straight link from that first box to that other
box'. If you really want to use modelling tools, I suppose you don't
want to use Dia ;-)

But the world is not so harsh as open source modelling tools do exist.
Try www.argouml.org for start and you'll get most of the UML diagrams as
only sequence diagrams are missing (Dia would only provide you with
boxes for the class diagrams).

Now if you're interested in round-triping from model to python code, and
back to model, you'd better use XMI. XMI is a standard XML serialization
format for UML. A lot of UML tools can write and read XMI. Hence a nice
solution sounds to convert XMI to python code. And back.
www.logilab.org/pypasax/ will help you on the way back as it takes
python code and serializes the parse tree to XML, then turn it into a
text-formatted model. It's not XMI yet, but that's the goal.

Hope this helps,

-- 
Nicolas Chauvat

http://www.logilab.com - "Mais où est donc Ornicar ?" - LOGILAB, Paris
(France)