Le 20/08/2012 15:52, Simone Tripodi a écrit : > Hi Gary! > >> I still like the idea! I was hoping at an automagic solution ;) > > Me too! :)
I have used several tools that were able to do such automatic diagrams generation. All tools that support roundtrip engineering should be able to do so. The free software tools I used are for example papyrus and topcased. I also used non-free tools for the same purpose. The result is *never* good. Of course, the result is theoretically accurate, it represents the current status of the code well, but it is completely useless and unreadable. I use diagrams mainly to explain something to the readers, to show the important stuff, to help them identify the fundamental aspects that may be completely hidden in a maze of implementation details. Automatic tools are not intelligent enough to identify what is meaningful and important and what should be discarded. If you look at some of the diagrams in the example pages I posted, you will see comments like "many methods not shown for clarity purposes". An automatic tool would not do that and would display all methods equally. Sometimes, I even suppress the method signature and show only the name, as the signature is irrelevant to understand the concept and would clutter the diagram. > > The only kind of "automagic" product I found was Objectaid for > Eclipse, but unfortunately > > * it is (was, at the time of experimenting) not possible to have that > tool included in the build; > > * it is specific IDE oriented (Eclipse) > > * it requires a minimum of human-interaction - automatically arranged > layout could suck > > * it is not completely free - license expires :( I tried to contact > them to obtain a license for OSS projects only, but did not success... > > This is a sample[1] a made for an assignment - it looks pretty good :P Sorry, I don't think so. There are too many things in this diagram, we don't know what the use links are for, the complete list of enumeration constants is too large ... This one of the reasons I like a small tool like plantuml. You can specify what you want to show and what is irrelelvant for a specific diagram. In fact, for one package or even one class, I often draw several different diagrams that focus on different aspects in different parts of the documentation, as these aspects are explained one after the other, not all together. So I understand this point of view is clearly not shared and I will therefore not include these diagrams in the documentation. best regards, Luc > > best, > -Simo > > [1] http://simonetripodi.github.com/shs/images/http-apis.png > > http://people.apache.org/~simonetripodi/ > http://simonetripodi.livejournal.com/ > http://twitter.com/simonetripodi > http://www.99soft.org/ > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org
