My Startup: A Different Take on UML - What do you think? | Hacker News Reader

My Startup: A Different Take on UML - What do you think?

blog.architexa.com

7 pointsvineet13 comments

When you're modifying stuff in the video, a dialog with a progress bar pops up for a split-second, but since the task finishes very quickly is disappears so quickly I feel it's unnecessary. Maybe move the progess bar to the status bar to avoid this annoyance.

Hey Maro,

Good point! We have been debating this. As the resource was small in the shown case the dialog just popped up for a split second. The reason why we have it is because nothing else can be done when processing is happening and if the resource is large it takes a little longer to process, so it makes sense to have a dialog there for that period. Any suggestions about how it can be made better are welcome.

Perhaps a small progress bar embedded in the element you activated? For the first example in the video, double clicking 'lapis' would show a small progress bar embedded in the bottom of that element itself. That would indicate that it has reacted to the user action, which is what's important. You could even do a safari-type thing and make the whole element into a progress bar.

Clicking the item again while it's still processing could bring up the dialog for more detail, or to let the user cancel the operation if it's taking too long. If long running operations don't actually happen, you could do away with the progress display altogether and just use a throbber. But they probably do happen.

If your engine can deal with it, this design also affords doing operations in parallel. If not, then you could queue up commands as they're performed.

mullr, Thanks for the comment. We definitely want to investigate such ideas.

So far we have been mostly focusing on the 'big picture' ideas, but will be working on improving such details as we get time.

Can this be used with other languages or only Java?

We have designed it in mind to easily add other languages. Currently their is a prototype for C++ built, but we want to do a really good job for one group of people (Java currently).

What language(s) would you like support for?

python

Yeah, Python support will be great.

I will count you under the 'votes for Python' category. If you know others, feel free to send them our way.

Ruby would be great as well, even though Eclipse's ruby support is not the best among IDEs. Maybe this could encourage this situation to change it.

Not sure if you already implemented it, but from the video it feels you click a lot when navigating through the uml graphs. Showing all nodes on the uml graph within a distance of 2 or 3 (depending on the ammount of nodes) would make it less clicky. Not to mention that a node on its own not really useful.

Grats on the very nice tool.

Ruby support may be implemented down the road depending on customer demand.

Many UML tools add too much info automatically, we have a number of features that allow users to add the nodes they care about with a single context menu click: Show Super/Subtype Hierarchy, show Extending/Extended Classes, and show referencing types / methods.

To elaborate what Seth said: We did try showing nodes automatically, but it often ended up with too much and users where forced to spend most of their time removing.

We will investigate further different version of adding nodes automatically.

BTW, glad you like the tool.

.Net (C# primarily)

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