Revive Project including Look and Feel

[kansasSamurai]

Was wondering what the realistic status of this project is?

It looks understandably "stale" but yet there do appear to be responses to intermittent questions (such as this) - as the title of the post suggests, I would like to help revive the project enough to get it working a little better. I have been working on java projects for about as long as this product has been available but only dabbled with its usage along the way, usually to create a quick dirty class or sequence diagram for personal use. But given its open source originations, I would like to help get it a little further in evolution.

To start, we all probably know java desktop apps have a bad rap for appearance. While most of us are developers, we can usually overlook eye candy for functionality but ArgoUML seems to be stuck in both regards.

While I am still trying to understand the entire build/deploy of this application, I have successfully integrated the new FlatLaf look and feel into the project and it looks pretty good (dark themes are a bit unusable IMO but that could probably be addressed in time). I will add a couple screenshots after this post but if anyone is interested, head over to this repo and you can see the rather simple implementation of adding the dependency to the POM and what I would like to say are relatively straight forward updates to the .../ui/LookAndFeelMgr class.
https://github.com/kansasSamurai/argouml/commits/PRE-0.35.2a/

Anyway, I probably won't make a ton of progress on this if I cannot round up a couple of collaborators and eventually it would be nice to actually introduce back to this main project but if there is no interest then I may not invest a lot of effort into it.

I guess my goal would be to not only improve the eye candy a bit but I've been re-introducing myself to the application for about a week and it seems a bit clunky so at least get "basic usage"* to work reliably. I think maybe just focusing on the diagrams a bit may be helpful. Maybe I'm just too inexperienced to understand everything it is trying to do but it seems difficult to just get some class definitions to participate reliably in sequence diagrams.

I don't mean to offend those who have worked hard on this in the past, just would like to see it get a couple steps forward as I also have some currently unstated goals as well. Am interested in a reply from those interested and/or currently maintaining this project.

[kansasSamurai]

Just a couple of screenshots... I wish I had a better model to show it off better but this should illustrate what it looks like.

Main Page:
p.s. I also modified the palette and implementation of the HeapMonitor a little - old colors were rather glaring IMO

Sysstem Information:

[stcarrez]

The Java version is going to give more and more issues. It does not work well with JDK 21 for example.

One big issue I've seen when doing some fixes myself is that there seem to be several UML libraries for which we don't have the sources (or, at least I couldn't find them).

Anyway, it would be great to revive the project (and drop the use of gerrit and gerrithub which is a strong showstopper for me).

[daybyter]

sdkman worked for me:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57031649/how-to-install-openjdk-8-jdk-on-debian-10-buster

With jdk8 installed, you can set source=1.5 target=1.5
1.5 was removed in newer jdk releases

[daybyter]

@daybyter Yeah... I haven't even ATTEMPTED to go above java8 yet knowing the hurdles it will face. Not that I don't want to get there but usability first (at least for me). Just to get my feet wet I have done some prototyping with GEF itself (with some internal updates/upgrades). I'm sure the following will not exactly impress but am working on understanding how to upgrade the fidelity of the diagrams and put together a GEF demo (seen below). I feel like I'm getting a solid understanding of the "architecture" of both GEF and Argo while I'm at it:

But you had JDK 8 working for you? It would be cool to use stream operations in a module. Would make my code shorter.

[daybyter]

@kansasSamurai : so I started with a simple state diagram, that I want to create code from later on.

The code generator still needs a lot of work, but so far it generates this code for the upstream port:

UpstreamInterface.sv.txt

[kansasSamurai]

@daybyter Sorry for the slow/late reply. My interest in Argo programming has taken me down some roads on some other projects that I have also left dormant myself for a while :)

But yes, Java8 is the only version I've been using locally and seems to work without issue. Sounds like you're probably past that by now but wanted to answer your question.

[daybyter]

I currently use a newer java but compile for the java version, that was used to compile the 0.35.1 release, so I can load the module in it. I wanted to move forward with the verilog module, so I can use it for productive work. I use the argouml.sh , not the argouml2 script, so I use the older metamodel. It seems Argo got stuck during the move to the newer eclipse metamodel? I recall those discussion, but it is sooo long ago.
I am currently struggling with some understanding of some state machine functions. It is not so easy to select conditions for me at the moment, as an example.

Anyway...thanks a lot for your response!

[kansasSamurai]

@linustolke Is there a reason the MDR project is not on this site? I'm having a heck of a time finding where that .jar is coming from (and the java-interfaces dependency)

[kansasSamurai]

@linustolke sorta nevermind. I overlooked that MDR is part of the core project. However, I'm still a little stumped on the java-interfaces jar.

[daybyter]

Maybe you have to understand to story behind all those UML implementations a bit. As the UML standard evolved, most UML implementations in the project were never really updated. So the ArgoUML project replaced one UML metamodel implementation with another. IIRC, the first version was the original version by Jason Elliot Robbins from UCI. When the next UML standard came, that was replaced with NSUML by Novosoft. When they lost interest in updating, that was replaced by the MDR implementation of UML. Then someone (I think Tom Morris?) proposed, that ArgoUML should become eclipse compatible (I think he proposed that Argo should become an eclipse plugin, more or less). So he worked on the eUML MM implementation, that replaced (more or less?) the MDR version. I am not sure, how far that transition actually went. It is many years ago, and my memory is not the best.

[kansasSamurai]

@daybyter As I've studied and worked with the project since my original post, I've "vaguely" pieced a lot of that together but certainly nice to have some 1st hand information!

[daybyter]

Are the old mailing lists available at archive.org, or so? The dev mailing list was a trove of info. Every google attempt I tried ended at some 404 page. When I search a while I might have a few thousand mails on some backup CD (if they are still readable).

[daybyter]

@linustolke sorta nevermind. I overlooked that MDR is part of the core project. However, I'm still a little stumped on the java-interfaces jar.

Do you know where the javadoc of the MDR OMG implementation is?

[linustolke]

Hello!

I am glad that there is a renewed amount of interest in argouml. I have done very little to it for the last years and all of that has been put into maintaining the infrastructure and updating the java versions. I am still behind on this working too slowly to keep up. Among other things sometimes during the summer, sonatype, that publishes the maven jars and snapshots have made some changes so the old setup stopped working with the consequence that there are no recent snapshots published.

When I moved the project from tigris I also chose to move it from svn to git and I chose gerrit and gerrithub because that is the way of working with git that mostly resembles svn with every developer close to the head of the master branch and maintaining a single line of commits with meaningful commit messages. As you can see on gerrithub I have a Jenkins running to build and run the tests of any suggested changes you upload to gerrithub.

It hope that with your enthusiasm argouml will start moving again. I am not sure what direction we should take though, I hope we can figure it out as we go along.

[daybyter]

Thanks for your efforts, Linus! Is there a howto, that shows how to clone, compile and install the current sources? I had to add a reference to the parentpom before the sources started to compile. I got quite a few errors, that indicated to me that the argo sources and the current metamodel version don't match?

But the problem might be, that I made some errors while compiling the sources.

I am current trying to use the sql module to create a verilog module but progress is slow, because I have to keep my company running. And there is some UML stuff, that I don't understand yet. Like using a UML component to create a module. And how to link a state chart to a component. But it is all learning by doing, so things change every day a bit.

[daybyter]

It seems the action to generate an entire project always starts with the classes in the project? What if I want to start with components, or so? A verilog project might not have any classes at all in it?

[daybyter]

So my current workaround is, that the verilog module simply searches the entire modell for statemachines at the moment. Not great, but I don't have a better solution at the moment. If anyone has better ideas, I would be thankful to hear them.