31st December 2007, 02:27 am
Joseph Method has set up an Alexandria wiki, and I thought I’d kick things off by writing down a few core requirements for Alexandria. Well, I have to start somewhere! I’m going to try to keep the core of these requirements slimmed down. There will be other pages for the other scenarios in which Alexandria might be used: for example, whether or not you’ve read a book belongs in the Home User scenario, as does the current rating system. (It’s pretty clear that writing these things down will modify our thinking about the domain.) It’s a different picture entirely for, say, a Lending Library or a Second-Hand Bookshop. I’ll add a couple of new pages for more specific requirements soon.
Continue reading ‘Requirements gathering on the Alexandria wiki’ »
30th December 2007, 09:56 pm
Alexandria is coming up to a design phase, and alongside capturing requirements the next big task will be modeling the new system. I hope we can be a bit more formal about it than is currently the case; we really need to have a few dozen core use cases before we move forward, otherwise we’ll just be adding features in an ad-hoc way, which is part of what’s got us into our current crisis of extensibility. After turning our vague statements of requirements into use cases, we should probably then proceed to domain modeling and sequence modeling.
So, we’ll need a modeling program, and we should probably just choose a single one which we can all use. Gaphor is a clean and simple UML modeling program for GNOME. It is, naturally, free software, released under the GNU GPL. It’s written in Python, is easy enough to install and very easy to use. It supports class, sequence and communication diagrams: the main diagrams we’ll be interested in.
Continue reading ‘UML Modeling with Gaphor’ »
28th December 2007, 05:25 am
Alexandria is a GNOME application written in Ruby. It is free software developed primarily for GNU/Linux systems, and is also developed on GNU/Linux. Almost everything you need for developing Alexandria will be available for easy installation on most distributions. This is a guide to setting up your system so you can work with the Alexandria source code.
Continue reading ‘Getting started with Alexandria development’ »