Almost 10 years ago, I was doing some work for a client when I found myself with some extra time on my hand. I had designed and implemented a real-time broker and I was waiting for the other development teams to finish up their work so that we could integrate.
A friend of mine that worked for Taskon had sent me a tool for the method OORAM and asked for my evaluation. I was pretty familiar with the method and had not long ago read (and I believed understood) the “Working with Objects – The OORAM Method” book from Trygve Reenskaug et al. Instead of waiting around, I thought it would be interesting to use the tool and the method to redesign the broker. It would be interesting to see if using the OORAM method could yield different ideas for my design.
When I read Reenskaug’s book, I liked it, but did not think of it as revolutionary. I had spent several years at Icon Computing where we worked on the Catalysis method; I had studied a slew of other design methods, and surely OORAM is just a slight variation…
I installed the tool and started to play with it with really no expectations. I was ultimately familiar with Design Patterns and all kinds of software architecture, having taught it for several years. Surely, no method or tool would help improve my PERFECT design :-).
Boy, was I in for a surprise… After a few hours in the OORAM tool, I started see a few abstract collaborations between roles in the broker that I had not seen before. After about a day, my view on the problem had changed completely. Then, mapping my new understanding in terms of roles, collaborations and various synthesis onto the implementation language (C++), I realized that I’d just come up with a far superior design. In fact, I was almost embarrassed by my previous design and spent the next few days reimplementing my broker.
Well, since then, Taskon (that made the tool) was bought up by another company and the tool was put to rest. The tool is no longer available to me and OORAM seems almost forgotten. What a shame!!!
A few weeks ago I was teaching a course on EMF/GMF, and I realized that with the current toolset in Eclipse, it would be relatively easy to build an OORAM tool for Eclipse. The metamodels are partially available from a submission from Reenskaug to UML 1.0 and I’ve even talked to Reenskaug about helping out on the project…
Now if I could only find some time to work on it (could someone please add a few more hours to the day???)…
By the way, if you are interested in the OORAM book, it seems to be out of print. However, you can download a PDF version (the last draft of the book before it went to the pubisher) here.
A friend of mine that worked for Taskon had sent me a tool for the method OORAM and asked for my evaluation. I was pretty familiar with the method and had not long ago read (and I believed understood) the “Working with Objects – The OORAM Method” book from Trygve Reenskaug et al. Instead of waiting around, I thought it would be interesting to use the tool and the method to redesign the broker. It would be interesting to see if using the OORAM method could yield different ideas for my design.
When I read Reenskaug’s book, I liked it, but did not think of it as revolutionary. I had spent several years at Icon Computing where we worked on the Catalysis method; I had studied a slew of other design methods, and surely OORAM is just a slight variation…
I installed the tool and started to play with it with really no expectations. I was ultimately familiar with Design Patterns and all kinds of software architecture, having taught it for several years. Surely, no method or tool would help improve my PERFECT design :-).
Boy, was I in for a surprise… After a few hours in the OORAM tool, I started see a few abstract collaborations between roles in the broker that I had not seen before. After about a day, my view on the problem had changed completely. Then, mapping my new understanding in terms of roles, collaborations and various synthesis onto the implementation language (C++), I realized that I’d just come up with a far superior design. In fact, I was almost embarrassed by my previous design and spent the next few days reimplementing my broker.
Well, since then, Taskon (that made the tool) was bought up by another company and the tool was put to rest. The tool is no longer available to me and OORAM seems almost forgotten. What a shame!!!
A few weeks ago I was teaching a course on EMF/GMF, and I realized that with the current toolset in Eclipse, it would be relatively easy to build an OORAM tool for Eclipse. The metamodels are partially available from a submission from Reenskaug to UML 1.0 and I’ve even talked to Reenskaug about helping out on the project…
Now if I could only find some time to work on it (could someone please add a few more hours to the day???)…
By the way, if you are interested in the OORAM book, it seems to be out of print. However, you can download a PDF version (the last draft of the book before it went to the pubisher) here.
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