(FC-Devel) Re: UXF

[Jason Elliot Robbins <jrobbins@cadet.ics.uci.edu>]

Hi Uche any everyone,

  I have been working on XMI support for Argo/UML over the last month,
so I have to add my comments to this thread.

 First, it looks pretty clear that XMI will be approved by OMG as the
standard for UML model interchange.  I have not seen any substancial
support for any other format.  From email exchanged with many Argo/UML
users I have found that there are millions of features that they
expect, and I think that interoperation with commercial CASE tools is
the only practical way that a small CASE tool can be adopted.  Maybe
someday Argo/UML or FreeCASE will be powerful enough to be a
stand-alone solution, but that day is years away.

 Second, my impression of UXF is similiar to that of Uche's: it is
much simpler than XMI.  However, XMI is not too hard to implement
because it follows the standard UML meta-model very closely.  Once you
figure out the basic structure of the XMI DTD, it should pretty
familiar to anyone who has worked with the UML meta-model.  Also, I
found that UXF organizes its structure around diagrams rather than
meta-model packages, that is not a good match for a tool that allows
the same object to be shown in multiple diagrams.  I chose to use PGML
to represent diagrams rather than XMI.

  I am working on debugging my use of XMI and PGML now and I hope to
release Argo/UML v0.6 with these features sometime next week.

For more information, see:

http://www.ibm.com/xmi/

http://www.software.ibm.com/ad/features/xmi.html

http://www.w3c.org/TR/1998/NOTE-PGML

http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/arch/uml

jason!


>UXF is basically a lightweight, XML-based format for describing UML 
>structures.  It covers class, collaboration and statechart diagrams.  The
> Web site is at
>http://www.yy.cs.keio.ac.jp/~suzuki/project/uxf/
>
>I underscore the word "lightweight".  There are other related standards (
>CDIF, XMI, RDF, etc.) going through standards bodies, but they are
>largely huge, complex, and tied to other meta-data initiatives such
>as MOF.  UXF is meant to do one job (UML exchange), and do it well.
>It is not meant to be a general meta-data repository exchange
>format, so it's much smaller, cleaner, and you can understand it at
>first glance.