Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)]

Hello every body out there, :)

Beside of the famous UML, there is another one : BON, which stands for
Business Object Notation.

BON, comes from the world of Eiffel users, seems relevant, but did not
caught the celebrity of UML. Just as a kind of quick poll, the request
"Unified Modeling Language" returns 1 310 000 results on google.fr,
while the request "Business Object Notation" returns a little as 1 710
on the same search engine.

There are some criticisms about UML, among these, one wich I share :
not easy to communicate with peoples with a such complex notation. BON
is much simpler.

Perhaps the reason why UML is so much popular is beceause of a good
marketing strategy which help it to reach this level of
celebrity, .... or perhaps beceause it is good.

If the reason is “Beceause UML is good”, one question which may
incidentally comes, could be "is BON less good than UML" ? ..... or is
it just beceause UML started to occupy all places befor BON comes into
live ?

Did you, Ada users, or curious-interested people, ever eval the
relevance of BON ? What do you think about it ?

Many thanks for any intellectual materials

Yannick.

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Martyn Pike]

Hibou57 (Yannick Duch�ne) wrote:
> Hello every body out there, :)
> 
> Beside of the famous UML, there is another one : BON, which stands for
> Business Object Notation.
> 

This is the first time I have ever heard of it. Thanks for the pointer.

> BON, comes from the world of Eiffel users, seems relevant, but did not
> caught the celebrity of UML. Just as a kind of quick poll, the request
> "Unified Modeling Language" returns 1 310 000 results on google.fr,
> while the request "Business Object Notation" returns a little as 1 710
> on the same search engine.
> 
> There are some criticisms about UML, among these, one wich I share :
> not easy to communicate with peoples with a such complex notation. BON
> is much simpler.
> 
> Perhaps the reason why UML is so much popular is beceause of a good
> marketing strategy which help it to reach this level of
> celebrity, .... or perhaps beceause it is good.
> 
> If the reason is �Beceause UML is good�, one question which may
> incidentally comes, could be "is BON less good than UML" ? ..... or is
> it just beceause UML started to occupy all places befor BON comes into
> live ?
> 
> Did you, Ada users, or curious-interested people, ever eval the
> relevance of BON ? What do you think about it ?
> 
> Many thanks for any intellectual materials
> 
> Yannick.

Are you an Ada user ? If so, what do you think about it ?
I would be most interested in knowing what tool support it like.

best regards, Martyn

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)]

On 10 jan, 19:06, Martyn Pike <emco...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This is the first time I have ever heard of it. Thanks for the pointer.
Here is what seems the official site : http://www.bon-method.com/index_normal.htm
(does not seems alive by the way, ... what a pitty)

> Are you an Ada user ?
Not as much as I would like.

> If so, what do you think about it ?
Simpler and easier to learn/understand, so better suited for
communication. Less redundances in the notation. Clearer, while UML
users sometimes have their own interpretation only.

Humm, to be honnest, I like the good old E/R diagram, as in my
opinion, it is a good one for analisies (while objects are good for
implementation design, not really for overall system or concept
analisies), and BON does not support such a thing.

> I would be most interested in knowing what tool support it like.
I'm disapointed to say that as it is not so famous as UML is, Ive
found just a lonely tool in the place : BONCaseTool. You may learn
about it here : http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~eiffel/bon_case_tool/index.html
But I do not like it, beceause it is only Eiffel oriented.


I use to talk with some one about it (notations), and I've learned
that a relevant number of people are simply using their own
notation.... Do you think it is a common behaviour ?

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Nicholas Collin Paul Gloucester]

On 2009-01-09, Hibou57 <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> wrote:

|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"Hello every body out there, :)"                                      |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|

Hello.

|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"[..]                                                                 |
|                                                                      |
|Perhaps the reason why UML is so much popular is beceause of a good   |
|marketing strategy which help it to reach this level of               |
|celebrity,"                                                           |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|

Perhaps.

|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|" .... or perhaps beceause it is good."                               |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|

No.

|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"[..]                                                                 |
|                                                                      |
|Did you, Ada users, or curious-interested people, ever eval the       |
|relevance of BON ? What do you think about it ?                       |
|                                                                      |
|Many thanks for any intellectual materials                            |
|                                                                      |
|Yannick."                                                             |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|

I have never evaluated BON.

Regards,

N. C. P.

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)]

On 12 jan, 18:50, Nicholas Collin Paul Gloucester
<Colin_Paul_Glos...@ACM.org> wrote:
> On 2009-01-09, Hibou57 <yannick_duch...@yahoo.fr> wrote:
>
> |----------------------------------------------------------------------|
> |"Hello every body out there, :)"                                      |
> |----------------------------------------------------------------------|
>
> Hello.
Re-

and thanks for this very nice quote design :)

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Britt Snodgrass]

I had never heard of BON before your post.  I doubt I would ever try
it unless it somehow becomes widely used.

I have used UML to develop an Ada design, in the context of the
Rhapsody UML modeling tool from Telelogic.  While this tool is very
good in most respects, UML models are awkward to use with Ada due to
terminology differences and the fact that many Ada semantic concepts
can't be easily expressed within the limits of UML 2.x.  Trying to
generate good Ada code by tweaking a UML model is a rather inefficient
way to work.

I think UML has some good features, and is useful to support the
design of an integrated system, including hardware and ASIC aspects.
To better support Ada software, UML needs a *standard* Ada specific
"profile" to customise the terminology and extend the semantics (i.e.
an "AdaML" variant of UML along the lines of the "SysML" variant that
was developed to support whole system design).

- Britt

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Martyn Pike]

Britt Snodgrass wrote:
> I had never heard of BON before your post.  I doubt I would ever try
> it unless it somehow becomes widely used.
> 
> I have used UML to develop an Ada design, in the context of the
> Rhapsody UML modeling tool from Telelogic.  While this tool is very
> good in most respects, UML models are awkward to use with Ada due to
> terminology differences and the fact that many Ada semantic concepts
> can't be easily expressed within the limits of UML 2.x.  Trying to
> generate good Ada code by tweaking a UML model is a rather inefficient
> way to work.
> 

I am glad you have pointed this out.  I also find this.

> I think UML has some good features, and is useful to support the
> design of an integrated system, including hardware and ASIC aspects.
> To better support Ada software, UML needs a *standard* Ada specific
> "profile" to customise the terminology and extend the semantics (i.e.
> an "AdaML" variant of UML along the lines of the "SysML" variant that
> was developed to support whole system design).
> 
> - Britt

I have often wondered why HOOD and HRT-HOOD have not remained popular 
within the Ada community.  Or perhaps they have - anyone care to comment ?

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Martin]

On Jan 12, 6:34 pm, Martyn Pike <emco...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I have often wondered why HOOD and HRT-HOOD have not remained popular
> within the Ada community.  Or perhaps they have - anyone care to comment ?

HOOD was allegedly 'mandatory' for EuroFighter back in the early 90s
but wasn't always used because the tool support was generally
considered appalling. In those days, Teamwork was the tool "de jour"
and it didn't do HOOD.

The method itself didn't attract those who got on perfectly well with
RTSA/OOD (the Ward-Mellor variety was particularly popular at the
time) - why make yourself less productive (and cost more)?

Cheers
-- Martin

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Jean-Pierre Rosen]

Martyn Pike a �crit :

> I have often wondered why HOOD and HRT-HOOD have not remained popular 
> within the Ada community.  Or perhaps they have - anyone care to comment ?

Because, unlike UML, they are not simply notations, but true design 
*methods*. They drive the design process through a precise engineering 
methodology. This "hampers the creativity" of those who want to write 
software as they please, and not as they are told to.

In the old times, people were proud of having obscure code with a 
comment saying "this is impossible to understand, but don't worry, it 
works". Nowadays, people are proud of covering the walls of their office 
with the most complicated class diagram possible. HOOD is intended to 
limit the complexity one has to deal with. How can you prove you are the 
big guy with such a method?

Hmmm, I think I could go on like this forever ;-)
-- 
---------------------------------------------------------
            J-P. Rosen (rosen@adalog.fr)
Visit Adalog's web site at http://www.adalog.fr

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Matteo Bordin]

On Jan 13, 8:50 am, Jean-Pierre Rosen <ro...@adalog.fr> wrote:
> Martyn Pike a écrit :
>
> > I have often wondered why HOOD and HRT-HOOD have not remained popular
> > within the Ada community.  Or perhaps they have - anyone care to comment ?

> Because, unlike UML, they are not simply notations, but true design
> *methods*. They drive the design process through a precise engineering
> methodology. This "hampers the creativity" of those who want to write
> software as they please, and not as they are told to.
>
> In the old times, people were proud of having obscure code with a
> comment saying "this is impossible to understand, but don't worry, it
> works". Nowadays, people are proud of covering the walls of their office
> with the most complicated class diagram possible. HOOD is intended to
> limit the complexity one has to deal with. How can you prove you are the
> big guy with such a method?
>
> Hmmm, I think I could go on like this forever ;-)

Because, as a metter of fact, UML is the only standardized 4GL. Or
because back in the days of HOOD, model-driven engineering was
basically moving boxes around and generate skeletons. When it became
evident that you wanted to do more with your models (i.e. analysis,
model simulation, model coverage, etc.) and that the maintenance of
such tools would have required wide use to be economically feasible,
people started looking for tools which could evolve and be supported
over time (or whose language was taught at Universities etc.).

In addition, (HRT-)HOOD, in my opinion lacked a fully specific
execution semantics which could trascend from the way code is
generated - something that other languages like SCADE have and that
UML (in its several flavours like SysML/MARTE) desperately tries to
have without (always) succeding. For the same reason I dislike Ada
profiles as the semantics of a model should be given by the modeling
language itself (the metamodel) rather than by knowing in advance how
you generate code. Then we can discuss which programming language can
better preserve the model semantics at lower abstraction levels - and
in this case Ada is clearly better than C or Java on several aspects.

For what regards enforcing a precise methodology through UML, just
enforce a modeling standard (exactly like you enforce a coding
standard), and you are done.

As a side note, UML reprised (sadly several years later) some good
ideas of HOOD, for example hiearchical decomposition and delegation,
making de facto feasible to design of HOOD-like models in UML (Artisan
indeed sponsored this to let its tools be used for Eurofighter).


> --
> ---------------------------------------------------------
>             J-P. Rosen (ro...@adalog.fr)
> Visit Adalog's web site athttp://www.adalog.fr

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)]

On 13 jan, 08:50, Jean-Pierre Rosen <ro...@adalog.fr> wrote:
> In the old times, people were proud of having obscure code with a
> comment saying "this is impossible to understand, but don't worry, it
> works". Nowadays, people are proud of covering the walls of their office
> with the most complicated class diagram possible. HOOD is intended to
> limit the complexity one has to deal with. How can you prove you are the
> big guy with such a method?
Someone somewhere gonna give a forced laugh. This comment goes on the
same ways as the one which talk about agressive marketing behaviour of
some UML promoters (I do not know if it is ok to have such words here,
so I may need to apologize, but now it is said)

> Hmmm, I think I could go on like this forever ;-)
Yes.

Interesting to note that one of the most ranked web page about HOOD,
is one on AdaLog : http://www.adalog.fr/hoodsamp.htm

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Jean-Pierre Rosen]

Hibou57 (Yannick Duch�ne) a �crit :
> Someone somewhere gonna give a forced laugh. This comment goes on the
> same ways as the one which talk about agressive marketing behaviour of
> some UML promoters (I do not know if it is ok to have such words here,
> so I may need to apologize, but now it is said)
> 
I don't know exactly what you mean with this comment, but what I wanted 
to say is this: UML is great at representing all the complexity of a 
design. HOOD is great at *hiding* all the complexity of a design by 
keeping the design, at each design step, below the complexity level of 
what a small head ((c)Hoare) can understand.

> Interesting to note that one of the most ranked web page about HOOD,
> is one on AdaLog : http://www.adalog.fr/hoodsamp.htm
Oh, are you discovering that Adalog has a long time involvment in HOOD? 
I don't think it ever was a secret...
-- 
---------------------------------------------------------
            J-P. Rosen (rosen@adalog.fr)
Visit Adalog's web site at http://www.adalog.fr

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Jeffrey R. Carter]

Jean-Pierre Rosen wrote:
>>
> what a small head ((c)Hoare) can understand.

The small head that one must live was Dijstra.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD01xx/EWD117.html

-- 
Jeff Carter
"C++: The power, elegance and simplicity of a hand grenade."
Ole-Hjalmar Kristensen
90

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Jean-Pierre Rosen]

Jeffrey R. Carter a �crit :
> Jean-Pierre Rosen wrote:
>>>
>> what a small head ((c)Hoare) can understand.
> 
> The small head that one must live was Dijstra.
> 
My mistake. BTW, it's Dijkstra.

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------
            J-P. Rosen (rosen@adalog.fr)
Visit Adalog's web site at http://www.adalog.fr

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Jeffrey R. Carter]

Jean-Pierre Rosen wrote:
>>
> My mistake. BTW, it's Dijkstra.

Indeed. I apologize for the typo.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"I've got to stay here, but there's no reason
why you folks shouldn't go out into the lobby
until this thing blows over."
Horse Feathers
50

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Nicholas Collin Paul Gloucester]

On 2009-01-13, Jean-Pierre Rosen <rosen@adalog.fr> wrote:

|----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"Martyn Pike a ?crit :                                                      |
|                                                                            |
|> I have often wondered why HOOD and HRT-HOOD have not remained popular     |
|> within the Ada community.  Or perhaps they have - anyone care to comment ?|
|                                                                            |
|Because, unlike UML, they are not simply notations, but true design         |
|*methods*. They drive the design process through a precise engineering      |
|methodology. [..]                                                           |
|                                                                            |
|[..]"                                                                       |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------------|

They do not.

Not only do they lack rules for proceeding step by step, but even
Burns and Wellings or another coauthor (who took HOOD and produced
HRT-HOOD) admitted that HOOD and HRT-HOOD are not the best (though
this is not why they are not popular): on Hardcopy Page 3-4 of Volume
1 of a preliminary defintion of HRT-HOOD it was indicated that formal
methods are better. It was claimed however in that preliminary
definition:
"Structured methods often use a graphical representation, but unlike
the informal diagrams these graphs are well defined"
which is quite a boast. The inconsistency applied to layering (and
hence to decomposition) in depicting use relationships to uncles as on
for example Page 11 of their technical report on how HRT-HOOD could
have been applied to the Olympus satellite (a technical report in
which they excused their inability to use HRT-HOOD to satisfy the
requirements which had been satisfied in the real mission without
HRT-HOOD as describing the launched design which accomplished what was
required as being overengineered) is reminiscent of problems with
inconsistent levels of abstraction in UML.

Note that in the large definition of RAVENSCAR coauthored by Burns and
Wellings and Dr. T. V. (another proponent of HRT-HOOD), HRT-HOOD was
not expressive enough for a diagram so a diagram like (but
incompatible with) a diagram which might appear in HRT-HOOD was
used. That is not a good advertisement.

On Hardcopy Pages 2-18 and 2-25 of Volume 2 of the aforementioned
HRT-HOOD document it was strongly recommended to add the Ada package
Calendar but more recently this banned in another doucment with an
intersecting set of coauthors (Hardcopy Page 19 of the aforementioned
RAVENSCAR document). Coherency, anyone?

The HRT-HOOD tool from Intecs-HRT was reputed to be very buggy. That
would not have helped to make it popular.

Yours sincerely,
Nicholas Collin Paul Gloucester

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Jean-Pierre Rosen]

Nicholas Collin Paul Gloucester a �crit :
> On 2009-01-13, Jean-Pierre Rosen <rosen@adalog.fr> wrote:
> 
> |----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
> |"Martyn Pike a ?crit :                                                      |
> |                                                                            |
> |> I have often wondered why HOOD and HRT-HOOD have not remained popular     |
> |> within the Ada community.  Or perhaps they have - anyone care to comment ?|
> |                                                                            |
> |Because, unlike UML, they are not simply notations, but true design         |
> |*methods*. They drive the design process through a precise engineering      |
> |methodology. [..]                                                           |
> |                                                                            |
> |[..]"                                                                       |
> |----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
> 
> They do not.
Of course the do! And they always did, since the very first days of
HOOD. Actually, HOOD is firstly a design method, the notation being
there only to help the design.

(FYI: I am the one who wrote the description of the full design process
for the official HOOD book).

> [SNIP long discussion about HRT-HOOD]
Please do no focuss on HRT-HOOD. It was a branch from HOOD-3, intended
for a specific purpose.

When talking about HOOD, please refer to the latest version, HOOD 4.

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------
           J-P. Rosen (rosen@adalog.fr)
Visit Adalog's web site at http://www.adalog.fr

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[sjw]

On Jan 12, 6:25 pm, Britt Snodgrass <britt.snodgr...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I have used UML to develop an Ada design, in the context of the
> Rhapsody UML modeling tool from Telelogic.  While this tool is very
> good in most respects, UML models are awkward to use with Ada due to
> terminology differences and the fact that many Ada semantic concepts
> can't be easily expressed within the limits of UML 2.x.  Trying to
> generate good Ada code by tweaking a UML model is a rather inefficient
> way to work.

Seems to me that this approach is a bit backwards.

You can create a UML profile aimed at Ada, as Artisan do, so that you
can say just about anything you want to in the UML about the Ada code
you want. But, if you want to write Ada, why not write Ada?

Use UML (a semantically constrained subset) to state analysis-level
properties of your problem domain (see eg http://coldframe.sourceforge.net/coldframe/analysis.html).
Then use manual or automatic translation according to a set of
translation rules (http://coldframe.sourceforge.net/coldframe/
translation-rules.html) to generate your Ada.

The clever Ada part comes in three places: (a) working out the
translation mappings (when the model says _this_, generate Ada like
_that_), (b) writing the standard runtime components, and (c)
realising when you need to implement something by hand.

On our project, we tend not to look at generated Ada specs (in fact,
most of us haven't had a lot of practice in writing them): we look at
the model instead.

For a much more complete approach, see eg http://www.mentor.com/products/sm/uml_suite/index.cfm
or http://www.kc.com/xuml.php

Of course, BON might be just as good a starting point.

> I think UML has some good features, and is useful to support the
> design of an integrated system, including hardware and ASIC aspects.
> To better support Ada software, UML needs a *standard* Ada specific
> "profile" to customise the terminology and extend the semantics (i.e.
> an "AdaML" variant of UML along the lines of the "SysML" variant that
> was developed to support whole system design).

Difficult enough to get an agreement about a non-language-specific
profile of 'executable UML'.

Of the 26 stereotypes and 37 tags in ColdFrame, there are some
(protected, for a type, for example) where the mapping to Ada is easy.
In all cases, though, one could conceive of a mapping to language X if
push came to shove.

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Martin]

On Jan 12, 6:25 pm, Britt Snodgrass <britt.snodgr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think UML has some good features, and is useful to support the
> design of an integrated system, including hardware and ASIC aspects.
> To better support Ada software, UML needs a *standard* Ada specific
> "profile" to customise the terminology and extend the semantics (i.e.
> an "AdaML" variant of UML along the lines of the "SysML" variant that
> was developed to support whole system design).

Back 2000-2002 I kept badgering the UML guys at Artisan and iLogix to
try and create such a profile and I did get the impression the OMG
were working on such a thing. But without being a paid-up member of
the OMG, you can't get access to such draft or working groups.

Artisan (Francis Thom - who's now no longer with them) published such
a profile (still available for $25) but without there being an OMG
stamp on the front only Artisan tools are likely to support it.

I aware of other companies that have developed their own profiles to
support both Ada95 and SPARK95 but I believe there are IP issues
within these companies which prevent them from entering the public
domain.

Shame.

Cheers
-- Martin

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)]

On 12 jan, 23:52, Martin <martin.do...@btopenworld.com> wrote:
> Back 2000-2002 I kept badgering the UML guys at **Artisan** and iLogix to
Please, when you and others are talking about “Artisan”, what are you
talking about ? I cannot figure out myself, as “Artisan” is also a
french word (a nice word I like), thus a request to search engines
about it does not return any relevant results. I would appreciate a
link. Many thanks

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[hesobreira]

On Jan 13, 10:31 am, Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)
<yannick_duch...@yahoo.fr> wrote:
> On 12 jan, 23:52, Martin <martin.do...@btopenworld.com> wrote:> Back 2000-2002 I kept badgering the UML guys at **Artisan** and iLogix to
>
> Please, when you and others are talking about “Artisan”, what are you
> talking about ? I cannot figure out myself, as “Artisan” is also a
> french word (a nice word I like), thus a request to search engines
> about it does not return any relevant results. I would appreciate a
> link. Many thanks

http://www.artisansoftwaretools.com/

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Martin]

On Jan 13, 9:31 am, Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)
<yannick_duch...@yahoo.fr> wrote:
> On 12 jan, 23:52, Martin <martin.do...@btopenworld.com> wrote:> Back 2000-2002 I kept badgering the UML guys at **Artisan** and iLogix to
>
> Please, when you and others are talking about “Artisan”, what are you
> talking about ? I cannot figure out myself, as “Artisan” is also a
> french word (a nice word I like), thus a request to search engines
> about it does not return any relevant results. I would appreciate a
> link. Many thanks

google "artisan uml" and it is the 1st hit. Makers of 'Artisan
Studio' (formerly 'realtime studio'). They offer Artisan Studio Uno
($0.00, single user) but this doesn't come with code generation :-(

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)]

On 13 jan, 17:23, Martin <martin.do...@btopenworld.com> wrote:
> google "artisan uml" and it is the 1st hit. Makers of 'Artisan
> Studio' (formerly 'realtime studio'). They offer Artisan Studio Uno
> ($0.00, single user) but this doesn't come with code generation :-(

Yes, that's hard whenever one is not an employee for a software
engineering business
But we've talk about two other good ones in this thread : you may look
at these.

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)]

On 12 jan, 19:25, Britt Snodgrass <britt.snodgr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I had never heard of BON before your post.  I doubt I would ever try
> it unless it somehow becomes widely used.
I admit that I had posted this to know if weither or not people are
using it, this undestranding it. I agree that if a notation is not
used, it make it unuseful, except for internal stuff.

> I have used UML to develop an Ada design, in the context of the
> Rhapsody UML modeling tool from Telelogic.  While this tool is very
> good in most respects,
At the risk to be a bit out of subject, here is nice UML diagram tool
I've tried : ArgoUML - http://argouml.tigris.org/

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[sjw]

On Jan 9, 3:38 pm, Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)
<yannick_duch...@yahoo.fr> wrote:

> There are some criticisms about UML, among these, one wich I share :
> not easy to communicate with peoples with a such complex notation. BON
> is much simpler.

A quick look suggests that BON is roughly equivalent to the subset of
UML which brings about 90% of the value.

> Perhaps the reason why UML is so much popular is beceause of a good
> marketing strategy which help it to reach this level of
> celebrity, .... or perhaps beceause it is good.

Ragbag of notations so each person on the project can choose which
subset to use (people have been known to think they had to use every
UML feature: that way lies madness and bankruptcy).

Lack of precise definition so it's not obvious you haven't really
thought through the problem.

Of course, both of those can be fixed; if you're going to generate
code, they have to be.

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)]

On 13 jan, 00:01, sjw <simon.j.wri...@mac.com> wrote:
> A quick look suggests that BON is roughly equivalent to the subset of
> UML which brings about 90% of the value.
I was looking for such a thing. As you seems to know about it, may I
ask you where can I find a consensual subset of UML ?

> Ragbag of notations so each person on the project can choose which
> subset to use (people have been known to think they had to use every
> UML feature: that way lies madness and bankruptcy).
So I'm not just an idiot (I feel a bit better now).

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Georg Bauhaus]

sjw schrieb:
> On Jan 9, 3:38 pm, Hibou57 (Yannick Duch�ne)
> <yannick_duch...@yahoo.fr> wrote:
> 
>> There are some criticisms about UML, among these, one wich I share :
>> not easy to communicate with peoples with a such complex notation. BON
>> is much simpler.
> 
> A quick look suggests that BON is roughly equivalent to the subset of
> UML which brings about 90% of the value.

BON's "constraint language" was, I guess, way ahead of UML's
in many ways.
The bubble drawings OTOH come with dahsed, single and double lines
and ASCII punctuation characters used as the sole means of conveying
essential differences. Isn't this a bit too simple?

Another tool---free or else supported at a cost---
that is rooted in Software Through Pictures is OpenAmeos.
UML edition available.
It draws you into designing a program around a specification
such that the specification always stays linked to the model,
formally. This might not seem unusual but with StP it feels
like this is the natural and only way to disign a system.
The links are explicit and an integral part of the approach.
The software includes  circuitry for testing the correspondence
of spec and  model.  A thing is that StP makes me start from
use cases and very little detail; it takes long until I arrive
 at those class diagrams which so many tools seem to put in
the center.

http://www.openameos.org/
http://www.aonix.com/stp.html

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)]

> BON's "constraint language" was, I guess, way ahead of UML's
> in many ways.
I've forgot to talk about it. Right.

Here is a PDF document which talk about a comparison of BON vs UML,
and introduce both contraint languages of BON and UML. The constraint
language, was indeed, one of the primarly goal of BON, and is a
natural part of it. While it was introduced later in the life of UML.

The PDF document about BON vs UML : http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~paige/Writing/uml99.pdf

> http://www.openameos.org/http://www.aonix.com/stp.html
Thanks for the link (the first time I heard about this one)

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Brian Drummond]

On Mon, 12 Jan 2009 15:01:13 -0800 (PST), sjw <simon.j.wright@mac.com>
wrote:

>On Jan 9, 3:38�pm, Hibou57 (Yannick Duch�ne)
><yannick_duch...@yahoo.fr> wrote:
>
>> There are some criticisms about UML, among these, one wich I share :
>> not easy to communicate with peoples with a such complex notation. BON
>> is much simpler.
>
>A quick look suggests that BON is roughly equivalent to the subset of
>UML which brings about 90% of the value.

Thanks to everyone for an interesting discussion. It inspired me to find
a second-hand copy of "Seamless Object-oriented software archtecture" by
Walden and Nerson.

It was in perfect condition; in approximately ten years in a University
library (from a Scottish university with a pretty good reputation for
computing science) it had been withdrawn precisely ... never.

- Brian

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)]

On 19 jan, 13:22, Brian Drummond <brian_drumm...@btconnect.com> wrote:
> Thanks to everyone for an interesting discussion. It inspired me to find
> a second-hand copy of "Seamless Object-oriented software archtecture" by
> Walden and Nerson.
>
> It was in perfect condition; in approximately ten years in a University
> library (from a Scottish university with a pretty good reputation for
> computing science) it had been withdrawn precisely ... never.
>
> - Brian
Not surprising : I started this thread with a comparison of the number
of result returned for a request about UML and BON. Further more, the
BON official web site seems mostly dead for at least some years.

But this does not tell anything about its usefulness

Re: Users of the BON notation among Ada users ?

[Brian Drummond]

On Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:44:27 -0800 (PST), Hibou57 (Yannick Duch�ne)
<yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr> wrote:

>On 19 jan, 13:22, Brian Drummond <brian_drumm...@btconnect.com> wrote:
>> Thanks to everyone for an interesting discussion. It inspired me to find
>> a second-hand copy of "Seamless Object-oriented software archtecture" by
>> Walden and Nerson.
>> ...it had been withdrawn precisely ... never.

>Not surprising : I started this thread with a comparison of the number
>of result returned for a request about UML and BON. Further more, the
>BON official web site seems mostly dead for at least some years.
>
>But this does not tell anything about its usefulness

Probably says a lot about its practical usefulness, unfortunately. Even
if it's the best design tool in the world, its actual implementation is
unlikely to be perfect. 

Which means time spent fighting the tools to overcome bugs, limitations,
documentation errors, etc. Unless you have a critical mass of users, you
get to bear an unreasonably large share of that.

- Brian (who has to fight enough tool problems in VHDL)