UML done right?

Don’t get me wrong, I have modeled my share of use cases, class and sequence diagrams – but I feel that I lack a lot of background knowledge on how to put all together, an uml development process. So I’m currently diving into to the OMG documents at uml.org to find out how you would start out modeling in UML with a given methodology. You can more or less easily draw your diagrams with modeling tools like StarUML but I have the impression that with understanding the process and leveraging model transformation the use of UML will be even more useful. I guess I’ll have to get a practical book on that topic as I find myself confused every time I start out with a new project.
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Still here .. with GWT and VMware image generation

And once again too much time has passed without me paying attention to the blog. I spent time experimenting with all sorts of apps and technologies and should’ve really posted some of my experiences.

Concerning my experiments with GWT – I upgraded to version 1.2.22 today and did realize the promised decrease in startup time when loading the project in the hosted mode browser but imho it could still be a bit smoother. The commercial GWT Designer (eclipse plugin, a free edition is available) looks very promising. Especially the useful wizards, refactoring support, I18N support and of course the visual designer make GWT development even more productive.

Another project I spend some time on lately, is the automatic generation of VMware images. The idea is basically to automate the installation of predefined software packages so that up-to-date images can be built at any time. Eventually custom images could be requested and the software installation could take place without supervision. I currently use the install scripts of the unattended.org project and an additional perl script to start the VM – as a prototype it works. I’ve also looked into other installer projects like WPKG, but I might end up creating my own database based package and profile management to enable user based profile definition via a web interface.

Btw, I need to get myself a new “java server” for the backyard: SUN’s Blackbox ;-)
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