[factset]

Hello,

I’m new to myEclipse and I think it is close to be a brilliant tool, but I miss a “tool chain” from design to implementation.

Lets say I want to create a new web application today.
Choosing Tomcat 6, Java EE5, Spring 2, Hibernate 3.2 sounds (today) a good combination, so with that config :

I have a dream… that today, with MyEclipse, I could :

1/ Generate a UML class diagram with my main entities (and especially the relation ships 1..n …)
Actually we can create such diagram, so far so good

2/ Generate Java entities classes (POJOs with generated getter/setters option) from the UML diagram
Actually we can do it (except getters/setters), but there is no support of Java5 generics (as List<MyEntity> or Set<MyEntity>), that is really a pitty.

3/ Generate Hibernate Mapping files + Database tables from the entities.
Actually, I don’t think we can do it.

If it comes to a fantastic dream, we could also have :
– Possibility of choosing usage of Hibernate mapping files or Persistence Annotations
– Both directions synchro UML <–> Java <–> Hibernate <–> Database
– because it’s a dream, I can add as well : not too much (not at all ?) markers or special comments in the Java classes to keep the synchro with UML, just virgin POJO

Would be nice isn’t ? :p

Regards
Philippe

[Riyad Kalla]

Philippe,
This *is* a great vision and takes a lot of work to implement, especially when the technology included in the vision is constantly changing. We have been hard at work at relizing good tooling for the individual technology stacks, and hope in a future release to better integrate the tools together to help achieve this sort of development.

[factset]

Sure.
In my humble opinion, you might start by the UML tool, to make it supporting Java5 and both direction synchro with POJOs.
If you could do that it would be very, very nice, really.
And I think that the UML tool is actually not too far away from that objective.

The hibernate mapping files generation from Java is obviously very nice, but I believe it is maybe less priority, because when you have done it one time, you know how to map a parent-children relationship, or a n-n relationship using an association table, these 2 relationships are the the one we see 80% of the time isn’t it ?
So you can work with copy&Paste from a working existing mapping file.
Generation is great, but I think we can do without it for now, and without loosing to much time.

But for UML, there is no real other solution, if the tool is not flexible enough, we can’t use it at all (maybe a bit excessive, I admit).

Thanks for your work !
Philippe

[Riyad Kalla]

, to make it supporting Java5 and both direction synchro with POJOs.

You are right we need to add Java 5 support. Also in our 5.5 release we implemented a new forward and reverse-engineering parser that will maintain custom code and no longer completely overwrite the files.

So you can go from Diagram -> POJO, then make customizations and other changes to the class and then make some more diagram changes and re-engineer the classes from it, and it will keep all your changes and resynchronize them with the diagram. It’s very slick and should make working with the tool much easier for folks that use UML throughout the development process.

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