Re: UML via XML ?

[Neil Graham <neil@cs.toronto.edu>]

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Hi Boris.  Strictly speaking, this is off-topic, so we should probably
take this off-list at some point...

On Fri, 25 Oct 2002, Boris Daix wrote:

> Hi,
> 
>    I was wondering if some of us have already worked on UML models :

As a matter of fact, I just finished a week-long course in UML and design
patterns.  Admittedly, it used Rational Rose, which is a heinously
inaccessible tool; but even setting aside that, UML is basically an
intensely graphical--pictorial might perhaps be a better term--means of
representing objects and their relationships.  i.e., I didn't get much 
out of the UML component of my course, and it's not clear to me
how useful UML itself can be to folks who are blind.  

> it seams that using XML to do this is a good way, but I'd like to get
> some experience feedback if any.  

Judging from http://www.omg.org, there is a standard that describes
"metamodels" in an abstract way; UML is a special case of
a metamodel.  This is MOF, or the metaObject Facility.  To facilitate a
vendor-neutral means of representing MOF, OMG has developed XMI--XML
Metadata Interchange.  So it should be possible, if you took an XMI
representation of a UML model, to do something really intelligent with it
in order to make it usable by us.  But I said possible, not obviously
tractable.  :)

> But I can say that I intend to use emacs + psgml + tdtd to work with
> this stuff, as these tools look very appropriate.  

Remember that XML is not an SGML language, so you probably don't want to
use an SGML parser for it.  There are loads of XML parsers that will run
on Linux and that can be called from all manner of languages; let me know
if you want references (I get paid to work on the Apache Xerces-Java
project, so I have to know a bit about this. :))

I've only started delving into this; would love to hear from the many more
experienced developers on this list with other perspectives.  (That is, if
Hans doesn't shut this down first. :) )

Cheers,
Neil