BabyUML

Richard Staehli rastaehli at mac.com
Fri Sep 23 16:58:58 UTC 2005


Trygve, I applaud this effort to close the gap between design and 
implementation.  I learned the distinction between an objects design 
"role" and its implementation "class" from your book "Working with 
Objects".  I agree that it is still a huge problem to rely on 
programmers to realized design constraints expressed in a separate 
(e.g. UML) language, if at all.

I have two main comments.  First, your short document ignores related 
work like the Model Driven Architecture work of the OMG.  While you may 
not have the time to follow all such work, you might find a very 
knowledgeable audience to critique your BabyUML work through Jan Øyvind 
Aagedal at SINTEF.

Second, I believe the biggest challenge in translating design to 
implementation is architectural tradeoffs to achieve extra-functional 
(QoS) properties.  Where OO design is concerned with the semantics of 
communication between objects, much of our implementation is concerned 
with the look and feel of a GUI or the scalability of algorithms to 
access persistent data.   These architectural tradeoffs are typically 
made in the context of a particular user environment or assumptions 
about the deployment resources and loads.  As a consequence, they are 
generally orthogonal to the primary functional decomposition.  In AOP 
terms, these are cross-cutting concerns.  If a programmer must specify 
how to resolve these architectural tradeoffs in BabyUML, then I expect 
BabyUML will be little better than a visual programming language; it 
will fail to untangle your spaghetti.  Our research in the QuA project 
(http://home.simula.no:8888/QuA/) suggests that design must be broken 
up into small components that are pieced together through architectural 
decisions by either a software architect/engineer, or perhaps by an 
automated "service planner".

I look forward to hearing more about BabyUML.

Richard Staehli

On Tuesday, September 20, 2005, at 01:10 AM, 
squeak-dev-request at lists.squeakfoundation.org wrote:

> BabyUML is a coherent multi-language discipline
>      for coding object interaction and objects/classes.
>
> An overview has been posted:
>      http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver/2005/babyuml/newdiscipline.pdf
>
> Sorry, folks - it's long (10 pages).
>
> The title may be a show stopper:
> Towards A New Discipline of Programming
>
> Enjoy
> --Trygve
>
> P.S.
> I have, of course, started building BabyUML an extension of Squeak,
> but it does not appear to be a realistic task for a one-person team.
> More about that when I see the response to this opener (if any).
>
> -- 
>
> Trygve Reenskaug      mailto: trygver at ifi.uio.no
> Morgedalsvn. 5A       http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver
> N-0378 Oslo           Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27
> Norway




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