Super Modeling With Together Control Center
by: Chris Bedford
TogetherSoft's Control Center 6.0 is a software development environment
that enables Java professionals to seamlessly integrate UML modeling into their
design and coding workflow. Any developer who needs to occasionally dive in and
understand existing systems should consider using a modeling tool.
Control Center is the best product I’ve seen in this category. It’s also
huge, encompassing support for UML diagrams, refactoring, GUI development, Web
services, audits, metrics, and a slew of other things that are best read about
on the company's Web site (www.togethersoft.com.) Rather than attempting to
cover everything in the product, I am going to look at it from the standpoint of
how it helps me perform one critical task: mapping out and evaluating an
existing complex code base.
Dealing With An Unfamiliar Existing Code Base
Has a panicked manager ever asked you to fix a customer-critical bug in an
unfamiliar system, while insisting on lurking nearby to "help”? Whenever this
happens to me I turn to tools like Control Center to quickly find my bearings.
Together's New Project Expert allows me to easily import and reverse engineer
large code bases into class diagrams that serve to give me an overview of a new
system. For this review I downloaded Castor (an open source Java persistence
framework of about 100,000 lines) and was able to import the whole thing in
under 20 seconds on a 600 MHz Pentium III box with 384MB of RAM. (See Figure
1.)
(enlarge)
Figure 1 -- Importing Files
with the New Project Expert
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Once your files are imported the first thing that you'll see is a top-level
package diagram (Figure
2). You can click on any sub-package to get a detailed view of the contents.
It works very well. The only problem that I experienced was with getting inner
classes to appear. Navigating to a new Castor package took about 5 to 10 seconds
the first time through on my box. Subsequent navigations were a little faster.
To test Control Center’s memory requirements I loaded diagrams for each of the
11 sub packages under org.exolab.castor. These were all moderately
complex, each containing an average of about 20 model elements (classes,
packages, interfaces.) Immediately after launching Control Center the Windows
Task Manager told me I was using 174MB of memory. After loading all 11 diagrams,
I was using 282MB.
(enlarge)
Figure 2 – The Initial Package Diagram Visible Right After
Import
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The top portion of Figure
3 illustrates Together's Designer View. This view contains one of the class
diagrams that you might see after drilling down a couple of levels into Castor's
sub-packages. The diagram provides you with an overview of the static
relationships between classes in the package (inheritance, containment, etc.)
The bottom portion of the figure shows the Java Editor view. If you click on any
class in the Designer View the corresponding code for that class will appear in
the Editor View.
(enlarge)
Figure 3 – The Designer View After Drilling Down into a
Package
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You might find the diagram in Figure
3 a bit busy due to all of the blue dashed line arrows pointing everywhere.
These lines indicate that a class or interface has some kind of dependency on
some other model element. For example, the dashed line from Query to PeristenceException is there because some methods
of Query throw PeristenceExceptions.
In general, a dependency arrow will be drawn from a depending
element to a depended-upon element any time that depending
references depended-upon via a local parameter, formal parameter, throws
clause, or member variable. If you find that dependency arrows overwhelm your
diagram you can turn them off. Figure 4
presents a simpler diagram in which only inheritance and containment (via class
member variables) relationships are shown.
(enlarge)
Figure 4 – A Class Diagram With Dependency Lines Not
Shown
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Chris has over 16 years of software development and management experience
and
was a key contributor on the engineering teams that won the 1992 Sun World
Prize and Unix Review's Product of the Year Award for 1997. Chris obtained
his
BS in computer science from Yale University and is a Sun Certified Java
Programmer, as well as an IBM Certified XML Developer and OO Analyst/UML
Designer.
Last Modified
October 14, 2002
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New Review:
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Why not just use the Java timer API? This open source scheduling
API boasts simplicity, ease-of-integration, a well-rounded feature
set, and it's free!
New Applet:
Reverse Complement
Reverse Complement is a simple applet that converts DNA or RNA
sequences into three useful formats.
Elsewhere on internet.com:
WebDeveloper Java
Lots of Java information on webdeveloper.com
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jGuru: Your View of the Java Universe
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