Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Software Tools

These days there are a great many tools that developers can use to create software. There is UML and the various products that use it. The Java world has Struts and its successors for application development. Ruby on Rails is currently enjoying popularity as a web application development platform.

What all of these have in common is a development style that they will tend to enforce on your team. This is not a bad thing, but it is something to be aware of, especially if you are using two or more with styles that conflict, or any that conflict with the company's process style.

An example of this is most UML products. They tend towards the process-heavy side of the spectrum, and recommend the full Analysis/Requirements/Design/Development/Testing cycle. If you are working in a Agile style, these tools will be a significant deviation from your accustomed process, and you will need to take this into account when shopping for the UML tool.

Another example is Rational Rose. One of the earlier versions was integrated with a relational DB mapping tool called Persistence. You could draw your UML class diagrams in Rose, and drop them into a generator that would generate the files that Persistence would use to generate the database access library code. The wrinkle came in that there was no way to split the UML into sections and have it generate database code that referenced tables not in the specific UML diagram. So you ended up with one huge monolithic database library, that took a long time to generate and build, making it painful to make database changes; the alternative was to split the UML into logical sections, but you would lose the database integrity checks, because the tools could not link across diagrams.



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