LWN: Comments on "LibreOffice 3.5 released"

Real UML tools

man_ls — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:31:16 +0000

Thanks for the review. As I said I prefer Xfce Terminal + vim, but Eclipse is fine e.g. for developing Android apps (and much better than the competition). I am not sure if I would still feel comfortable with it for anything more complex. To be honest I am in a "Back to basics" mood with respect to dev tools; I even prefer to do refactorings by hand. Probably a secondary effect of being test-infected!

Real UML tools

angdraug — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:16:55 +0000

If there's one word to describe Enterprise Architect, it's byzantian. It's the most complete UML CASE tool I've used so far, and the basic diagram editing is rather sensible, but around the corners it has some very rough edges. I'm not fond of its collaboration mode (sticks everything in an sql db with all-or-nothing locks on whole sections of project tree, makes roundrips to the db when you least expect it, and has no revision management to speak of), also it's Windows-only and won't run in Wine without some serious voodoo and CrossOver.

I'm not sure I would agree with your assessment of Eclipse. I know I is many things to many people, but, being a vim+xterm person myself, I find it unwieldy and often at odds with my workflow. I'd rather have a CASE tool that's integrated with a distributed SCM like git, so that I could track the design right next to the code. Integrate it with anything beyond that, especially a monster such as Eclipse, and I won't touch it with a 10-feet pole.

Real UML tools

man_ls — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 14:25:59 +0000

Actually, I wasn't even referring specifically to Free software work. For my own software I normally use vim and Terminal, and they fit the job perfectly. But even in the enterprise world there are no good UML tools. (I have not used Enterprise Architect, do you think it qualifies?)

However, the intersection of Free software and enterprise software has a rich set of tools, including Eclipse and its many plugins. Eclipse does a lot of hard things well, and is somewhat of a counterexample to your arguments. It is striking that no good diagramming plugin for Eclipse exists, at the very least.

Real UML tools

angdraug — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 10:53:34 +0000

I think the problem is twofold. On one hand, a quality CASE tool is hard to do, it takes a lot of effort and a lot of usability research, and software engineering as a field isn't as easy to study from the PoV of usability as e.g. web browsing or making presentations. On the other hand, workflows in the free software development are very different from the primary target audience of CASE tools: massive enterprise software projects. Different enough that simply ripping off an existing tool such as Enterprise Architect wouldn't help much to scratch an itch of a would-be free CASE tool developer.

For one, tools like EA put a lot of restrictions on how you work, especially on the collaboration side of things, and they simply don't work if only a small fraction of contributors are willing to follow such restrictions, and most others just want to do some programming. Even bigger problem is that in free software, you really don't want to discourage casual one-off contributions, and nothing says "we don't want your code" like an unwieldy process tied into a specific CASE tool.

Real UML tools

man_ls — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 19:00:29 +0000

Definitely not my use case at the moment (InkScape fills the bill nicely for the random diagrams I need), but good to know about. Thanks.

Real UML tools

man_ls — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 18:58:46 +0000

Thanks for the pointers. Dia feels a bit primitive indeed, after a cursory look. Sigh, I miss Together/J... 12 years later I have yet to see anything as flexible and useful as it was in its time.

Why is it that UML has never given fruit in the shape of proper CASE tools, apart from some honorable (but transient) exceptions? In the meantime the tooling has improved greatly for coding and compiling even for exotic languages, but for design diagrams we are still in the stone age. I am sure it must mean something, but I am not sure what.

LibreOffice 3.5 released

ralphdegennaro — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 15:46:43 +0000

I'm with you on this one. I've built many of my clients "down'n'dirty" Access apps. I can't get them off MS Office because of the "well since we have to buy Access, let's just stay with the whole suite" type comments/perspective.

Real UML tools

dlang — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 11:52:59 +0000

blockdiag doesn't do clipart, but it does many different shapes, colors, etc. including rounded corners if you want them.

It's not the right tool for every job, but it does a lot more than you seem to think it does.

and it scales very well. I was able to throw a network structure with 135 networks, 600 devices, and around 3K interfaces at it and it was able to create a diagram from it with the nwdiag tool

Real UML tools

angdraug — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 09:43:39 +0000

Looks like blockdiag has come a long way since I last looked at it, I'll give it another try!

I was mainly using Dia and Bouml. Dia is not really a UML tool, it's more of a free-form diagram tool that happens to include UML elements. Still, it's easier than spelling out every block and connection by hand in Inkscape.

Bouml is a proper CASE tool that organizes your diagrams into projects and improves consistency between diagrams by reusing design elements between different types of diagrams (e.g. you define your methods in a class diagram and reuse them in a sequence diagram). On the downside, Bouml as a project is essentially a one-man show that has been frozen for the last couple of years, and now it seems to have taken a turn towards going proprietary with its long-overdue port to Qt4, so I can't in good faith recommend it.

There are other tools out there such as Umbrella and Gaphor, but they also have their limitations. Umbrella's diagrams are even more ugly than Dia's, and Gaphor is still very young and glitchy. I'm keeping an eye on it, though: it's being actively developed and seems to be moving in the right direction.

Real UML tools

man_ls — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 09:30:31 +0000

It seems nice, but it definitely covers a different set of use cases than Visio or Inkscape. Not that I need the stupid Visio clipart, I can select my own in OpenClipArt if I want (which I don't); but interactivity and colors are good! Non-square forms and arrows are useful sometimes too. And doing true Web 2.0 diagrams requires round corners. (Just joking, but barely.)

Real UML tools

dlang — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 01:04:57 +0000

a very useful set of tools that I recently ran across is http://blockdiag.com (apache licensed python code)

it takes a text config file and makes a diagram from it. use .svg diagrams if you can (they are MUCH faster to render than the default .png diagrams.

there is a live demo at http://blockdiag.com/en/blockdiag/demo.html (javascript required), fiddle with it and learn

the config file for this can be as simple as

{
A -> B -> C;
B -> D;
}

Real UML tools

man_ls — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:56:17 +0000

Just curious, what UML tools are you referring to? I use Inkscape which is very useful and generates SVG, but is hardly a UML tool. I for one would welcome a free, libre offering for my diagrams -- even if they are not always UML.

built-in Grammar checker

csawtell — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 23:54:08 +0000

From another linguistically aware blog.

Grammar: The difference between knowing your shit, and knowing you're shit.

Well does it?

LibreOffice 3.5 released

avtechmjc — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:50:04 +0000

Can we replace MS Access yet?

Last time I checked, making reports with Base (and the ReportBuilder plugin) was horrible. The reports were static - they didn't update if you re-opened the report.

It works OK browsing tables though (if you install the Sun java, rather than openjdk - otherwise the speed is terrible - maybe the new native postgresql driver will fix that issue!)

LibreOffice 3.5 released

dag- — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 09:42:12 +0000

My experiences with the development team are also very positive. I do some work around automation and conversion, and interface with LibreOffice for this. The recent releases are quite stable, import and export filters matured and as a whole it responds a lot faster.

Obviously, there are various things that can be improved more and various bugs have not been squashed yet, but the achievement of the LibreOffice project (and the Document Foundation in general) is that progress is happening, it happens at a fast pace, and anyone can help make it go faster.

Since I am not a C++ developer myself, I am bound to discussions with developers and reporting bugs. And even that is quite rewarding since new releases happen on a monthly basis, there is a fast turn-around time to reporting a bug and it potentially hitting the next release.

Good work to everyone involved !

LibreOffice 3.5 released

Zizzle — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 21:23:17 +0000

Inspired by the disparaging comments of Rob Weir (such as http://lwn.net/Articles/450900/ ) and the good vibes about the project from Michael Meeks's blog, I finally put my money where my mouth is and managed to get a patch into this release.

It made the features page, not trying to toot my own horn, that's not the purpose of this post.

I just wanted to say that getting the patch included was very easy, and the team very helpful.

It was very rewarding.

So I encourage you to get a build going and check out the Easy Hacks page.

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Easy_Hacks

Despite Rob's remarks, I think the clean up efforts are very valuable and will only accelerate the project.

I'm glad to have contributed a copyleft patch to help LibreOffice stay out of the hands of sharks looking to coopt it into their proprietary suites.

built-in Grammar checker

boog — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:44:30 +0000

In some European languages at least, there are quite useful and simple checks possible that are called "grammar checking" (they involve more than one word and all words exist in the dictionary). A typical example would be to check that adjectival endings in French respect masculine/feminine gender and singular/plural. These checks have been available in Word for ages and I have missed them since getting rid of it.

Grammar checker unit tests appreciated.

tialaramex — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:10:03 +0000

I don't see any test scaffolding in that repository. My python is mediocre, so I'm definitely not going to attempt to build one from scratch.

I will say that the "ying and yang" -> "yin and yang" suggestion, although it's not itself very useful because "ying" is flagged as a spelling mistake already [at least on this system] does show where "zero false positives" is somewhat practical for units larger than a single English word. Of course you would need a lot of work to establish which things are "always" errors.

For example "ad homonym" and "all intensive purposes" are almost always going to be errors, but for every few times you find "tow the line" used when "toe the line" was meant, you'll stumble over a case where an actual rope was being towed.

built-in Grammar checker

mpr22 — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:25:18 +0000

In response to the notion that grammar checkers for English are dangerous boondoggles: Isle great you're cheese, than.

LibreOffice 3.5 released

angdraug — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 09:55:59 +0000

Visio import filter is my favorite addition in this release, that doodling tool is used for software design in too many Microsoft-loving shops, exacerbated by the Visio users' tendency to export their diagrams as JPEGs (probably because people who know the difference between raster and vector graphics tend to stay away from Visio and use real UML tools). Yay for LibreOffice!

Grammar checker unit tests appreciated.

mmeeks — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 09:28:33 +0000

> On the downside they're trying anyway, confident that if their rules are
> just vague enough they're bound to help. I notice that they haven't tried
> the benchmark Professor Pullum implicitly offers, typing several pages of
> a major literary work (say, Moby Dick, or Pride and Prejudice) into this
> software with everything enabled and verifying that it flags none of the
> excellent prose as incorrect.

So lightproof is designed to be minimal and give ~zero false positives. But your idea is a good-one :-) What would be awesome, would be if you could get several of these smallish but representative classic texts, and create some unit tests in the lightproof module, such that we can ensure that not only are there no false positives now, but there will be none in future :-) patches most welcome (this is a volunteer project). The lightproof git repo is here:

git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/lightproof

Thanks for checking this out though ! :-)

built-in Grammar checker

tialaramex — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 09:11:47 +0000

Well, on the upside the author has at least done enough research to discover that people who ought to know (such as G. K. Pullum) recommend against even trying.

On the downside they're trying anyway, confident that if their rules are just vague enough they're bound to help. I notice that they haven't tried the benchmark Professor Pullum implicitly offers, typing several pages of a major literary work (say, Moby Dick, or Pride and Prejudice) into this software with everything enabled and verifying that it flags none of the excellent prose as incorrect. I think that building a collection of such inputs would have been simultaneously a good practical test of the software and a disheartening lesson on the difficulty of the general problem.

Several of the rules cited in that link seem harmless, but aren't grammar rules at all. Choosing to highlight violations of style such as double spacing may or may not help people, but it has nothing to do with grammar.

built-in Grammar checker

macson_g — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 07:53:57 +0000

Just read on the associated blog entry:

http://libreoffice.hu/2011/12/08/grammar-checking-in-libr...

The implementation is based around detecting suspicious patterns. Looks like useful feature to have.

built-in Grammar checker

proski — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 03:10:19 +0000

I often mistype short words, especially it/is/if/in, you/your and then/than. A grammar checker should be able to catch it. I'm not sure if the grammar checker is a separate project, but I don't see anything wrong with it being an integral part of LibreOffice. I consider it a grammar-aware extension to the spell checker.

built-in Grammar checker

tialaramex — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 00:19:14 +0000

I hope this was an outside project rather than something the foundation itself supported. The grammar of most natural languages cannot usefully be assessed with the rudimentary machine "checking" that's popular and somewhat effective for spelling. Grammar checkers mostly serve to give people who aren't very confident in their use of language a bunch of superstitious beliefs that make their writing awkward and leave them frustrated (e.g. it's common for such checkers to forbid preposition stranding in English even though stranding is sometimes the right choice).

Of course (I assume) this is off by default, but it's one of those features that will sucker in users who'd be better off without it. Those most capable of rejecting bad rules from such a "checker" won't be foolish enough to enable it in the first place.

LibreOffice 3.5 released

atai — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 20:54:18 +0000

Wonderful! LibreOffice is getting momentum.