byterock

Well continuing on with my AD&D theme am taking another break from Moose Code and looking at design again. Well this time I wanted to see how many common 'roles' I might have between my differing Character Races and Classes and the large number of scribblings I have laying under my desk where getting annoying.

So I started with what I was most familiar with with ye old ULM Object Diagram using a little freeware designer from smartdraw. Well it worked ok for the base attributes of my Character class (name,race, ability scores etc.) as they will be put into a model eventually but it wasn't helping me with my roles as these are, for lack of a better words 'Business rules' and they where just cluttering up my diagram.

I did try a few plugins for Eclipse, one for Java and one for Ruby with piss poor results yet again. It was hard to force them into creating 'roles' like entities (java was close with interfaces) outside of classes or where so closely linked to a classes I was doing twice the typing. Typical for Eclipse it died often and always (it seemed) on a save.

I went back to ARIS Express and tried their class diagram editor and again did not have much luck as it was much the same as my smartdraw.

Somewhere along the line I clicked the wrong button and opened an ARIS Org Chart and happen to see the word 'Roles'. Well being one never to look a gift horse in the mouth I tried it out. By using their built in 'smart designer' I was able to come up with this

in about 20 mins of reading and typing.

Now at least I can see all the common 'Roles' that I will have to create. Not much to do with perl but a nice free design tool to work with when you are modeling roles.

Now I wonder if I can hack into the 'ADF' file and create a few package files from it??