Rolf Lampa wrote:
a. cremer wrote:
<snip>
Furthermore I am still struggling with the mediawiki project structure. Any hints where I can find more information on that?
You are not alone on that one...
What I'd like to see would be a kind of a class diagram and/or some dependency diagrams revealing some of the internal logic of Mediawiki.
From experience with MDA I do know (yes I really do) that *not all* the aspects of a system can be captured in a class- nor only a database diagram (I used Borland's "Bold", now CodeGear's - "Eco"). For example "Behavior" would not be captured at all, but Behavior unfortunately covers some ~ 50% of a system(?).
However, a class diagram and/or a database relations diagram really really would help.
Someone who wants to gradually document their increasing insights from their "research" of the Mediawiki platform and internal structure could use, for example, StarUML (free) to try capture their new insights in UML diagrams (preferably class and sequence diagrams, in that order).
Perhaps the developer team could then review such diagrams and comment on their "correctness" and gradually a very compact system documentation would take form - if they don't already have such diagrams somewhere, no?
Curiosity: As I was one of the first to use MDA for designing a "full" enterprise business system (from scratch) with Borland's Model Driven Architecture (Bold MDA, for Delphi), I can tell that the first UML model of the (Bold/ECO) system was drawn by, not the architects or core developers of the Bold Architecture, but instead it was drawn by a friend of mine who wanted to get down to the bones with it(!). Now, when the Bold core developer team saw the diagrams he had drawn they asked him if he could think of letting them use it to document their technical platform. Of course they could. Now, the interesting bit in all this was of course that Bold/Eco is a platform which was explicitly designed for automagically executing exactly such UML models, which they lacked in the very original lab... ahem.
(This Bold/Eco architecture is today included only in the Architect version of Delphi/C# enterprise versions).
Regards,
// Rolf Lampa