Glad to learn you found the approach interesting, and thanks for mentioning the TextUML Toolkit on your blog.
Some comments re: “the value of entering text in one language (TextUML) over entering the same information in say, Java”:
1) TextUML is not really a language, it is just a notation for UML, just as the graphical notation everybody is familiar with.
2) There are many ways of producing a UML model (reverse-engineering, model transformation, manual authoring), depending on the goals (documentation, code generation) one will be more appropriate than the other.
3) The fact that the TextUML notation is textual does not imply the abstraction level is lowered by any means. It is hard for me to see how a general-purpose OOPL such as Java could make do as a modeling language.
4) The goal of the TextUML Toolkit is to be a tool for model authoring that is more developer-friendly than what graphical notation-based tools usually offer. UMLGraph, on the other hand, is a tool for generating documentation from the implementation code (no models are created). I actually considered integrating UMLGraph diagram generation abilities in the TextUML Toolkit, but unfortunately it is currently a bit too tightly coupled with Java/Javadoc, which makes it hard to integrate with.
August 11th, 2008 at 8:31 am
Hi Patrick,
Glad to learn you found the approach interesting, and thanks for mentioning the TextUML Toolkit on your blog.
Some comments re: “the value of entering text in one language (TextUML) over entering the same information in say, Java”:
1) TextUML is not really a language, it is just a notation for UML, just as the graphical notation everybody is familiar with.
2) There are many ways of producing a UML model (reverse-engineering, model transformation, manual authoring), depending on the goals (documentation, code generation) one will be more appropriate than the other.
3) The fact that the TextUML notation is textual does not imply the abstraction level is lowered by any means. It is hard for me to see how a general-purpose OOPL such as Java could make do as a modeling language.
4) The goal of the TextUML Toolkit is to be a tool for model authoring that is more developer-friendly than what graphical notation-based tools usually offer. UMLGraph, on the other hand, is a tool for generating documentation from the implementation code (no models are created). I actually considered integrating UMLGraph diagram generation abilities in the TextUML Toolkit, but unfortunately it is currently a bit too tightly coupled with Java/Javadoc, which makes it hard to integrate with.
Cheers,
Rafael