I want to save the a BPMN model into an executable XML format. What to choose between XPDL,BPEL,BPMN 2.0 XML. The XML file is going to be executed by a workflow engine.
The executable format you need will depend on what the workflow engine you use understands. Having said that: the only format in which you really can "save" the BPMN model without loosing or modifying some of your BPMN execution semantics is BPMN XML, because it's directly defined in the BPMN spec and therefore you don't have any mapping issues in between formats. Nowadays, the process engines of the bigger commercial vendors (IBM, Oracle, SAP) support BPMN XML, and the Open Source process engines in the Java space (Activiti, Bonita BPM, Camunda BPM, jBPM) support it, too.
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Is it possible to create Prolog-specific bindings of XML schema files? If so, can anybody point me in the right direction?
I have a schema which I use in Java to create a JAXB binding to serialize and de-serialize XML files. These files are created by an SWI-Prolog application which is still evolving and is developed by a geographically distant team. I want to make sure that when XML format changes, they are tied to a schema file change and not just view a schema as a nice documentation tool which often lags their actual XML content.
Any suggestions are appreciated.
Sounds like the general consensus is to use Prolog's JPL package to wrap a JAXB binding in Java. This is the closest one seems to get to an actual binding implementation.
There is an SGML package which is used by many, but this is not a binding. As far as I understand, the best one can hope for is to be able to validate one's XML against the schema, but a quick look at the SGML documentation did not give me an impression that this functionality is actually fully implemented.
So, if one needs a schema binding-style XML management framework, the recommendation is to access JAXB binding of this schema via JPL. Some folks expressed stability concerns of JPL. They reported frequent crashes of JVM when using JPL, but I have not independently verified these claims and thus cannot confirm them. If anybody has more input on this topic, I would love to get it.
Thanks
See the title: I have around 50 XSD files importing each other (with tags) and I need to analyze their dependencies.
Do you know any software (preferably free) to generate a dependency diagram automatically from these files?
I did not find any existing program to do that, so... I developed my own! It is called GraphVisu.
There is a first program to generate the graph structure from seed XSD files, and another one to visualise graphs. I also included a detection of clusters of interrelated nodes (called "strongly connected components" in graph theory).
Feel free to use it!
I am not aware of any free solution tailored specifically for XSD. If I would have to build it using freely available components, I would probably consider GraphViz. You would need to write a module to generate the data needed by GraphViz which will come from parsing the XSD files. The latter is kind of trivial, if you take into account how schema location works and is resolved, and handle correctly circular dependencies. The good thing is that GraphViz is supported on a wide set of platforms, and as long as you can parse XML, you could be set.
I've also developed my own, in form of an XML Schema Refactoring (XSR) add-on for QTAssistant. This particular feature set has been around since 2004, so it works really well, including WSDL and XSD files.
I can interpret differently what you asked, so I'll refer to what you could do with XSR:
XSD files dependencies
This is a simple one, showing a hierarchical layout.
This is a more complex one, showign an organic layout.
intra-XSD file schema components dependencies: can be filtered on arbitrary criteria (not sure what you meant by with tags).
XSD file set schema components dependencies (same as the above, but one can navigate across different files)
The tool comes with an automation library, where you can write a few lines of C# or Java script code which you can then invoke using QTAssistant shell or a command line shell to integrate it with an automatic build process.
Other features include the ability to export the underlying data using GraphML, that is if you wish to analyse or process the graph further (e.g. topological sorting, cycles, etc.)
Does anyone know if there's a usable tool for generating RUP-style artifacts from a UML model in the rational toolset (i.e. Rational Software Architect, App Developer etc)?
Specifically, I need to be able to extract information from class (and potentially sequence) diagrams and create software design documents, preferably using Word (or maybe PDF).
I've tried BIRT and its just not usable. Is there anything else out there that is?
Thanks
Haven't used it for a few years but SoDA used to be the main way to generate docs with Rational tools. It wasn't free back then, not sure about now.
That's the only 'out of the box' doc generator I know of. However you should be able to use some/most of the eclipse modelling tools to roll your own by extracting model info into some intermediate format and then generating docs. So, for example, you could:
Use xtend2 to extract model info and write as restructured text files
Use sphinx to generate html or pdf from the .rst files.
hth.
There is the Rational Publishing Engine.
I'm not sure how closely this resembles either BIRT or SoDA, whether it's a rehash or a from-scratch implementation or what, but it's what's supported by IBM at the present time.
I have no first-hand experience with it, but I have a colleague who does and he seems to like it.
I have designed UML diagrams in different tools (StarUML, BoUML, Papyrus, Omondo, Rational Rose, etc.) depending on the project and the date (rose was first, after Omondo, then starUMl, ..., now papyrus). However, I see that I cannot open my old UML diagrams because the tool is obsolete.
I would like to know if there is a standard format for UML diagrams. Probably not in production, but at least to know if there is proposal of standard format.
Probably, Eclipse is doing something like that with the M2 project, but do the other tools (not eclipse based) are interested in reading this format.?
Each UML tool uses its own format, but I think the era of proprietary format is over, and open format for diagrams like this should exist.
I have two answers to this:
In theory the standard exchange format for UML models is XMI but it´s true that each vendor implements a slightly different version so interchange is not a reality. Nevertheless, most tools are converging to at least support the Eclipse MDT-UML2 XMI implementation which in my opinion is becoming de facto XMI standard.
The OMG is working on a new standard : Diagram Definition that is supposed to fix the problems with the current XMI one (they are working a lot with many of the top vendors to make sure that this time they all go in the same direction) and, also important, it will allow to interchange not only the data (i.e. the info about the model elements) but also the layout and graphical representation so that after the import you get a model exactly as the same you exported in the first place
Have you heard of XMI?
#JordiCabot here adds some interesting details about it.
Besides Jordi's reference to the Diagram Definition standardization activity, please note that there is another action ongoing from OMG:
a request for comments has been issued in June 2011 for a CANONICAL XMI format, which is basically a subset and a set of additional rules for writing XMI documents that should limit the possibility of creating different XMI dialects, or at least should allow tools to understand a common dialect (the canonical one).
I'm designing a software component which will get instructions from other components on how the UML diagram should look like, and then will produce this UML diagram in different presentation ways (in SVG, GIF, etc.), for example (in Java):
DiagramDesigner designer = new DiagramDesigner();
designer.setStyle('Use Cases')
designer.addActor('User');
designer.addUseCase('Print Document');
// etc.
String svg = designer.getSvg();
I don't want to re-invent the wheel and want to use some industry-standard language/interface for interconnection between my DiagramDesigner and other components. I'm looking for an interface similar to DOM, but for UML, not for XML.
Can anyone help? Thanks in advance.
ps. Besides the example above I would like to make my diagrams inter-operable and transferrable between servers, e.g.:
// first server
String script = designer.getScript();
// second server
DiagramDesigner desiger2 = DiagramDesigner.import(script);
So if I understand you right, you are looking for a way to work with UML on the metamodel level. You should look at the MOF standard and its implementation the EMF (Eclipse Modeling Framework), which is used by almost all Eclipse based UML tools and this framework is used by many other modeling projects, it even somewhat influenced the standardization of MOF (resulting in SMOF and EMOF split) and therefore I would declare it industry standard.
Probably only loosely related but anyhow: PlantUML. It is open source, built in Java and likely contains already parts of what you want to do.
You can inspire from these scripts to generate any output you want:
http://askuml.com/
Currently examples are given in yUML because they're nice but could be anything.
At least for the syntax part, you could get some inspiration from the large set of textual UML tools (theses tools allow designers to textually specify the model and then they automatically show the model graphically using the standard UML notation).
At least of such tools here: http://modeling-languages.com/content/uml-tools#textual