Umlizer lives!

Still is an early alpha release but nevertheless it lives! At this moment it currently handles all the formats I want for version one and has been tested against all target Plone versions. In other words, it meets the requirements I set for this tool, and now what remains is cleanup, documentation, and more testing.

What is Umlizer?
Umlizer is a Plone 2.5x/3.x package that introspects your Zope Object DataBase (ZODB) and then returns a view of your database in the specification that you want. Currently Umlizer provides the following formats for its view:

• DOT for rendering into UML via graphviz
• UML in JPG rendered via graphviz if graphviz is installed
• HTML list for easy reading
  
• Comma Seperate Values (CSV)
• 3-d animated graph rendered via ubigraph

Before you ask this is a very Plone specific tool. Django already has a similiar tool called DjangoGraqhviz.

Why Umlizer?Umlizer was designed to represent the complexity of the Nasa Science site architecture, which was originally a rather complex UML diagram. The XMI for that UML diagram became corrupted, and we did not have a backup. Training people on the database has thus been a chore since, whether they be developers or content editors. In a couple other projects I've noticed that going through Plone code to figure out an architecture can be a pain. So what about a pretty diagram?

For nearly a year I tooled around with different iterations of this effort. In general, each of these iterations relied on protected Python scripts in Plone, which are limited and forced the user of the tool to make many steps before getting a view. These scripts were fragile and arcane, and just plain sucked. Different views of the data were impossible to generate. The latest version of this hack had really nice code, but was a hack.

So I thought, why not try to make it a Zope 3 style Plone package again? My previous attempt in September of 2007 tanked, but my skills in this arena had really improved thanks to training, a cancelled Zope 3 effort, and lately my co-worker Reed's insistence on using it and my need to maintain and extend his work.

Also, in the Plone community, thanks to Jens Klein we have ArchGenXml which is why we used UML in the first place. When I met him in Italy in October of 2007 for Plone Conference 2007, he told me about a pet project of his called Genesis. From what he said at the oldest pizzeria in the world is that Genesis is ArchGenXml with a very modular architecture. So I was determined to make this as modular as possible, trying to work outside the confines of Plone and isolating individual pieces as much as possible.

After about a week of playing with this along with my other duties, Umlizer is working at an alpha level!

Where can we get Umlizer?
That is a very good question. Because of our internal need for documentation this was done under the auspices of NASA. One of the things on my schedule tomorrow is asking for permission to release Umlizer as an open source package. Since there is nothing sensitive about Umlizer, I don't see anything preventing its release.

Must use ubigraph

I finally spent a few minutes playing with Ubigraph, a 3-d animating tool for generating nodes and edges graphs on the fly. The API is straightforward xmlrpc which Python handles very well. The result is nothing less than amazing.

Granted the documentation needs work. But even what exists lets you do a lot of really fun things. I look forward to finding ways to use this amazing tool. As I go forward it will be interesting to compare the very complete (some say cluttered) Graphviz feature list with that of Ubigraph.

Its all good though. This makes a great companion for Graphviz. Thats because Graphviz can generate things in many static image formats where as Ubigraph renders inside an OS window that I guess you can capture via Flash or Quicktime. So both have their place in my world.

I love graphing

I don't mean charting (pie, bar, line, etc). I mean drawing edges and nodes and showing relations between objects of all sorts. That means between data objects, code objects, people, companies, and so much more. Its lots of fun and writing clean, extensible code to do it is a blast for me.

Mostly I work in graphviz using Python. I played with PyDot for a while but wasn't happy with it so I tend to write some base code to handle things in a way that ended up being duplicated by the GvGen project. Which is very nicely done.

However, there are limits to graphviz. Graphviz doesn't do animation or make 3-d images are two big items. However, its nice and light as a renderer which is very important especially for generating content for the web on the fly. Nevertheless I've done wonderful things like mapping out relations between 150 applications or reverse engineering ZODB content into UML.

So imagine my delight when I found Ubigraph this morning. It does 3-d graphs and animates things. I don't think it will replace Graphviz because it does different things. I haven't played with it yet but I will.