Re: case tools

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

martin.dowie@btopenworld.com (Martin Dowie) writes:

> There is a move within the AdaUK and led by Artisan
> (www.artisansw.com) to come up with standard UML<->Ada mappings,
> perhaps analogous to the mapping between IDL and Ada.

I have probably said this before .. although I can see the value of an
out-of-the-box mapping, to get projects started, I don't believe that
the mapping appropriate to "my" project is necessarily appropriate to
"yours".

I also think that the UML<-Ada part will prove challenging .. the Ada
package is quite a hard concept to express in UML, and the idea of a
generic signature is even more fun. To some extend this depends on the
tool concerned .. UML allows, I think, the concept of a parameterised
collaboration (generic package to you and me, I think) but Rose
doesn't.

I think it is highly questionable whether every Ada construct should
be representable in UML. For a start, it allows individual developers
a lot of licence as to what architectural features they use, and you
don't always want that; anyone who has seen the amazing code
generation property sheets available in Rose and, I think, Rhapsody
(don't know Artisan) will know what I mean.