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Closed 11 years ago.
What is a good tool to design the implementation of websites? I typically use UMl to design applications, but I feel that does not apply well to websites, specifically the heavy emphasis on UI that websites require.
What would be a good tool to use to plan a webpage?
What kind of model do you need?
Are you capturing some information about the visual aspects? In which case wire-frames or other story-boarding techniques are good.
You also need may to capture navigation information, which can be done via story-boarding but sometimes a UML state diagram is more succint and easy to reason about.
Then you may also wish to capture the data model associated with each state, and in which case a simple UML class diagram works well.
In an AJAX-based app you also need to document the "invisible" ajax activities, and again UML state diagrams along with classes for the invoked REST services can be helpful.
For the UI, I'd certainly not use UML but a wireframing tool like MockingBird or Pencil. The first one has my preference, it's awesome. Just try it.
Well, I use PowerPoint to create web page mockups. It's fast, and allows you to create "storyboards" that simulate actual use of the website and its various pages.
PowerPoint is great for presenting conceptual ideas, or modeling the UI for a real person to see if they understand it (kind of like a high-resolution paper prototype).
The PowerPoint Prototyping Toolkit provides a collection of shapes, such as textboxes and dropdowns, that assist in creating form mockups. This template is also useful.
You can take a look at ForeUI. You can design not only the UI but also the behavior of the website. Here is an example: Blog Mockup Created with ForeUI
Related
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm learning Haskell for great good.
I'm pretty into OOP and the various type systems. I used Java to develop webapps (Java EE, spring, Hibernate, struts 1.x), now I'm using regularly Python (pylons, django, sqlalchemy, pymongo) and Javascript. I had a huge improvement in my personal productivity: the lightweight approach, duck typing, awesome iterators, functions as first class citizens, simple syntax and configuration, fast tools like pip and distribute (and much more) helped me a lot.
But the first reason of my productivity boost is the Python language itself.
What are the main benefits of using Haskell for web developing?
For example, how its type inference can really improve my web app? So far, I noticed that when you decorate your function with its type-signature you are adding a lot of semantics to your program. I expect all this effort to come back in some way, to save many lines of code and to make them sound. I really like the sharp distinction between types and data, I'm starting to understand how they works, but I want something back :P
Don't get me wrong, I've just started studying Haskell so Maybe I'm missing some awesomness but I really want to understand its paradigm and when it's worth using it.
Most web applications aim to be stateless and handle concurrency well. Its also rather important to scale (Google SEO reasons, and user experience).
Haskell handles these problems rather well (although IMHO in more academic and perhaps less "human" intuitive way).
That being said due to the sheer lack of people doing web app dev (compared to say node.js) and that traditional web app dev has been more focused in a OOP mind frame it might be rather difficult.
I had some issues trying to use it as you can see in my questions below:
How do I do automatic data serialization of data objects?
Handling incremental Data Modeling Changes in Functional Programming
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Closed 11 years ago.
What is the best turnkey (ready to use, industrial-strength) relation detection library?
I have been playing around with NLTK and the results I get are not very satisfactory.
http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/book/ch07.html
http://nltk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/doc/howto/relextract.html
Ideally, I would like a library that can take sentences like:
"Sarah killed a wolf that was eating a child"
and turn it into a data structure that means something like:
killed(Sarah, wolf) AND eating(wolf,child)
I know that this is the subject of a large body of research and that it is not an easy task. That said, is anyone aware of a reasonably robust ready-to-use library for detecting relations?
Update: Extractiv is no longer available.
Extractiv's On-Demand REST service:
http://rest.extractiv.com/extractiv/?url=https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4732686/best-turnkey-relation-detection-library&output_format=html_viewer will process this page, extract and display the two semantic triples you desire in the bottom left corner under "GENERIC". (It throws away some of the text from the page in the html viewer, but this text is not thrown away if you utilize json or rdf output).
This is assuming you're open to a commercial, industrial strength solution, though limited free usage is allowed. It's a web service but open source libraries can be used to access it or could be purchased from Language Computer Corporation.
These relations can be read fairly easily out of the output of dependency notations. For instance, put into the Stanford Parser online, you can see both of the two subject-verb-object triples in your example in the typed dependencies collapsed representation as:
nsubj(killed-2, Sarah-1)
dobj(killed-2, wolf-4)
nsubj(eating-7, wolf-4)
dobj(eating-7, child-9)
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Closed 9 years ago.
My company uses Jira for storing requirements, which are written in the form of User Stories ("As a ... I want ... So that...") with details in the subtasks ("Given ... when ... then...").
I write requirements, usually an iteration ahead of the developers.
I tend to draft my requirements in a word processor before putting them in Jira. I like the flexibility as I'm working out the best way to organize the information, jumping around from one story to another, using search & replace as I figure out the clearest wording, etc.
While a word processor outline is helpful for much of this, it's not so good at tracking issue links: dependencies & related requirements.
So, can anybody recommend a good tool for writing stories & tasks which allows me to diagram relationships as I write?
I've been thinking in terms of something which handles concept mapping (though not mind mapping, which is generally limited to 1 central concept). This is just for my personal authoring; I don't need a project management system.
Thanks in advance.
Update: After posting this, I started wondering about TiddlyWiki. That's not quite the right tool, given its linking methods, but seems the right direction... Does that vein spark any ideas?
What about a simple spreadsheet (like this one)? A spreadsheet is extremely powerful (to re/organize, filter, etc) and has always worked well for me (use indentation if required or a additional column for IDs of related stories).
We use a combination of spreadsheets and an internal Wiki for user stories. The spreadsheet holds the basic information, like ID, title, user role, priority and so on as well as a link to the Wiki page for this story.
The Wiki page then has all the information about the user story, a full description, acceptance criteria, design notes and so on.
If there are dependencies between stories these are included as links within the user story usually with a short note about what this dependency means (e.g. "This story assumes that story x has been completed" or "Y & Z are not part of this story, but of story X").
This is a pretty low-tech solution, and doesn't really support visual diagrams of relations. However, it has worked for us so far.
Perhaps this is overkill, but does Mingle by Thoughtworks do what you need?
(I am not actually a Mingle user, but this sounds like the sort of thing it would do.)
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Closed 10 years ago.
What is a great way to learn good UML design? How often do you draw diagrams (other than static diagram of classes)? What is the best source for learning it?
I think Martin Fowler's "UML Distilled" is the best book for learning UML syntax. It's succinct and dense with information.
Unfortunately, knowing UML syntax well is not the same thing as knowing how to design.
Practical UML
UML Overview
I dunno, it depends on how big team is. Class/Sequence/Use cases is what mostly used for me I think. The most important thing is not overuse diagraming, couse the main goal is to help comunicate among team, help understand things same way, not just to make some useless diagrams papers and not use them.
However very complex system developed by group of teams, obviously require more diagrams I think, just to make sure everyone knows what they are doing and how things relate in system. There's quite lot good tools these days that help in modeling.
There was one project make I worked on where we used Enterprise Architect to make UML diagrams which we round-tripped (forward- and reverse-engineered) with the C# source code.
It (UML) wasn't good at defining the implementation of each method (using sequence diagrams), but it was OK defining the signatures of interfaces and of classes (i.e. the declarations, not definitions, of methods).
It was useful because you could have:
A diagram which shows how a group of classes interact (whereas with source code you see classes one at a time)
Different diagrams with different groups of classes; and sometimes the same class can appear on more than one diagram.
This was for a project where it was a requirement to create design documentation, with traceability from the use cases though design.
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Closed 10 years ago.
Does anyone know of a decent UML standards guide?
My company currently relies on UML 2.0 (rightly or wrongly) to do the majority (read all) of their design work. I have been asked to come up with a draft 'best practice' guide to help other developers develop better models. The main problem I face is that Im slightly biased against UML... I feel that: if a diagram takes more than 5 mins to draw then its too complicated! Im looking for advice predominantly on what sort of standards I should be looking at. Also Im looking for an external source of information that can be used to balence out my irrational loathing of UML-heavy design and act as a 'sanitizer' for my suggestions.
Most of all Im looking to write a useful document rather than one that will sit moulding away in some obscure network directory.
Any ideas?
UML Distilled by Martin Fowler
Like Paul C, I recommend UML Distilled. It is primarily about UML, but it contains a lot of insight about design in general (although it insists a bit too much on index cards IMO), it is short, pleasant to read, and to the point.
I strongly recommend against UML in a Nutshell. It is the worst O'Reilly book I have: insanely dense, hard to read and meandering. Not worth the paper it is printed on.
We are not talking about a book that says how to use UML, but rather a style or standards guide of some sort. Enter, UML profiles... This can get you both the standardization and reduced complexity you are looking for. You can limit the relationships and elements which can be used. You can also require certain things. A large company may choose to focus on the assets and data movement and limit it's standardized diagrams to this view. However, a company making real-time software for tanks might focus on action or flow.
The whole point of UML is that it is not specific and useful for every kind of situation. Martin Fowler and Elements of style books will not reduce diagramming time and increase comprehension. You need standardized profiles or patterns for than. I have seen it work, to the point that the business can read them. Many tools allow you to create a profile which eases learning curve for the designers and reduces drawing time.
MDA Distilled (OMG Press) is a good book if you want to understand the concepts, but it is not needed.
Really, UML Profiles. You don't want a standard because your company or your need is different. A standard for Web Services does not work for real-time or financial services.
Buy everyone a copy of The Elements of UML 2.0 Style. Job done.
For a quick reference on how to compose individual UML diagrams, I heartily recommend The Elements of UML Style 2.0 and I put my money where my recommendation lies by purchasing the 2nd edition to replace my 1st ed.
Apart from this recommendation, I think the most important thing in a company when introducing any style guide is to have a local feedback mechanism where people can post comments on which aspects of the style guide work for them, especially when you're using an official printed guide. A wiki or similar casual repository should suffice for this.
I also suggest highlighting diagrams which were particularly good examples (or bad ones, if the team humor could take it). Consider a framed Diagram of the Week like the Employee of the Week you see in so many stores. That gives a gentle reminder that diagram readability is taken seriously but hopefully with enough fun to get more buy-in to the concept.
I know you probably want an easy to read book for this but from what you are describing I would suggest going with the specs found on OMG itself. They are a bit much to read but would be as complete as you could hope for. They also have lonks to articles and tutorials that may be helpful.
As far as books go I have found that Using UML is quite good since it tackles the software development process as well as the UML tools and methods.