RE: Picking the Tools

[Robin Cover <robin@isogen.com>]

On Mon, 21 May 2001, Uche Ogbuji wrote:

[Len]
> > Ok.  Both you and Uche make the same point: UML
> > is an object modeling methodology.  I agree that
> > XML documents are not object-oriented programs.  I know we've

I was not aware that UML "is" or even "prescribes" a
particular methodology... clarification?

[Uche]
> Unfortunately, I think we're stuck in a crease here.  UML is not
> expressive enough to model whatever we'd want to in XML/RDF/TM, etc., but
> it does have mature tools and strong adoption.
> 
> XML Schemas, RDF and TM are, at the low-level, what we want, but I
> quite understand that not too many people would want to do all their
> modeling directly in these tools the way things now stand.

I think the decisions *do* relate largely to tools.  One can design
beautiful modeling languages, (meta-)markup languages, and other
formalisms that are ever so great (because they are so "meta" and
so "abstract"), and declare these designs "powerful."  But they are
fairly powerless until we have software.  Software that knows about
or can be made to understand the semantic relationships/properties so
elegantly modeled.  Right.

Apropos of which, Microsoft's new Visual Studio.NET [I am not
advocating its use] has a lot of 'XML' support, and it
features an "Object Role Modeling (ORM)" facility.  Undoubtedly
imperfect and incomplete, but some people might use it, since
there's software, and it helps at an important level of
abstraction where a simple alphabet (like XML) is totally
impotent with respect to the modeling goal and its one piece of
official software (the "XML processor").  A lot of UML/XMI tools
are coming onto the market for similar reasons (I think).  Today's
example, or one of them: "BOX Tool Generates XML DTDs and
Vector Graphics Diagrams from UML/XMI", see
http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2001-05-21-a.html.

On the MS 'ORM' feature, see:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/nextgen/technology/orm.asp
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/nextgen/technology/enterprisedefault.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2001/May01/05-21VSEEpr.asp

Best wishes,

Robin Cover