Development Process

Composum is a tool for modelling, design und documentation. The tool may be appointed during the whole development process. Without code generation or round trip engineering the implementation takes place with any development environment independently of Composum. For the documentation the emerging code can undertaken and reprocessed in Composum at any time by the integrated reverse engineering.

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Documentation Process

In Composum documents are composed of text segments, parts of documents, diagrams and illustrations. In this structure documents can edited and complete created in the whole or over their components. Every document and every part of document can be exported by PDF-, RTF- and HTML-format.

Project

The Composum-Project represents the framework to the organisation of all modelling elements. All modelling objects are organized into packages to structuring of the model. These packages can contain all types of elements (classes, diagrams, dokuments etc).

The project tree illustrates the whole structure. Any manipulations are possible in this structure. Every package defines an own namespace as usual for Java^TM. At the same time these packages are represented for classes and interfaces the Java-packages.

All elements of the model are reachable by the project tree. Components of classes (attributes, methods, relations) and of diagrams (pictures of parts of the diagram, objects, relations) are illustrated by the project tree, too and can manipulated directly.

At present the three most important types of diagrams of the UML suite (use case diagram, class diagram, sequence diagram) are supported Composum. Component diagram and activity diagram will be the next extensions. Composum is structured so modularly that new types of diagrams can be added any time (also individual and on inquiry). All diagrams have been expanded by a structural element - the picture of parts of the diagram. With the picture of parts of the diagram the diagram details can selected durable, named and used (referenced) elsewhere (especially in the text document).
 

Use Case Diagram

Use case diagrams describe several project scenarios without disturbing details. All intended elements for use case diagrams are supported by Composum. Elements, which will be improved at a later time in other diagrams (classes, instances, assoociations), may be already here predefined and represented in different ways.

Class Diagram

The static structure of classes and objects of a project and their relations among themselves are defined at the class diagram. Because of the main focus of java programming Composum especially offers interfaces with specific graphical description and the transformation between classes and interfaces.
 

Sequence Diagram

The sequence diagram exemplary describes concrete order of events (sequences). Composum is able to provide sequences and messages with semantics, which guarantees for sequence diagrams the consistency in the model. Messages can be associated in the sequence diagram with methods of the involved objects. In future sequence diagrams should to be met to our test tool Exacum as a pattern for test sequences directly.

The diagrams, illustrations and pictures of parts of the diagram are put together in a text module. Texts, i.e. paragraphs, chapter and documents are model elements themselves and therefore they could used for the building of documents.

As in usual text processing programs and in Composum with graphical elements also all elements can defined by styles and these can used to the text elements. Cross references and automatic captions are integrated also.

In a text processing program any text elements or documents and parts of documents can individually edited. The text elements automatically get a component of the project tree in their respective document or element.

Every document can separately or as a part of a larger document exported. Possible formats for the export are PDF-, RTF-, HTML or XSL/FO-format. Following the result of this can directly sended or printed. A further editing isnīt necessary.