RE: [Webware-discuss] Excitement! :D

[Chris G. <ch...@il...>]

> I'm excited, too!  I've been a Webware user for almost 2+ 
> years, and I, too, and BURIED WITH WORK(tm).  It's great to 
> see all the activity, and I would love to help create some 
> simple examples/tutorials.  I'm a big lover of diagrams and 
> think about things visually all the time.

Sweet, another visual thinker! Too few in the Computer Science world.
Everyone's so damn analytical.
 
> I can contribute some UML or other visual representations of 
> how things work within Webware.  In the open-source world, I 
> only know of ArgoUML (http://argouml.tigris.org I think) as a 
> tool that we can use (or the community edition of Poseidon, 
> the free/commercial version of ArgoUML).

Poseidon is, in my opinion, a bloated sack of crap. ArgoUML is much cleaner
and simpler, and crashes less. I think we should go for that. Since we're
not writing anything in Java or generating source code, or managing a large
project, the Poseidon features won't be of much help.

> Does anyone have any suggestions for other open-source 
> diagramming tools?  And, what has anyone wished they could 
> see visually?  I'm thinking a diagram companion to "anatomy 
> of a transaction" would be a good place to start.

I think it would be cool if people understood how the Appserver itself
worked, because if you don't understand how the Appserver works, at least
generally, you're not going to get far with Webware. :)

The idea of the pools-of-cached-servlets, plugins, Configurable classes, the
global environment, etc., would be nice to capture somehow. Dunno how you'd
make it easy to visualize though. Maybe an animated diagram with a request
coming in and moving through the pipeline! :D