I have been at software design for quite a while now and UML has been my constant companion for a good part of this time. Whenever I think of UML I think how great it is for helping with software design, but also how more or less uinversely rubbish most of the UML design applications are.

I have used tonnes of them, the big and expensive ones, the small funky ones and the in between ones and they all have their problems. I especially hate the ones that require at least 100 mouse clicks and popup options screens to get anything done, they are a real RSI minefield! Sometimes I think you would be better off with a pen and paper…

Every so often I go and on the hunt for new or improved offerings, testing them on real projects. This all takes time and I haven’t gone on such a hunt for 2 years now – So could anybody please recommend what they think is the best UML package out there at the moment and hopefully save me some time?

Here are some of the things I would like from a design app:

• Efficient user interface, the less clunky context menus and mouse clicks the better!
• Not tied to any particular programming language
• Affordable (open source would be great!)
• Standards Compliant (no renaming or reinventing of bits of the UML)
• Easy to copy diagrams out into other documents
• Good support for the different diagram types

Oh also, are there any decent cloud offerings?

Cheers – looking forward to hear your suggestions!

Surewash have just put their new website live to coincide with the launch of their hand hygine training product at the Matter Private Hospital. This time it was ‘our’ Sinead who designed and built the website which runs atop WordPress and we are very proud of how it looks and performs.

Meanwhile, we wish Surewash and the Matter Private every success with the launch!

The Cork News has today launched their new online newspaper. We worked closely with Pride Design to build and deploy the website. It was quite an involved design & build but once again drupal proved to be more than up to the job! A site like this really puts a CMS to the test!

Anyway we think that the site looks and works really well. To celebrate the launch the Cork News are running a competition with a great prize, to enter the competition all you have to do is visit this page:

www.thecorknews.ie/articles/introducing-brand-new-beefed-bold-beautiful-and-frankly-brilliant-cork-news-website

To enter, just hit the share button to share it with your friends on Facebook, and then leave a comment on the page.

Tethras, an innovative Dublin company that provides a cloud based Localization Enginering service for mobile App developers have launched their new website, and to celebrate they are offering $100 off your first purchase for any language!

We have worked a lot with Tethras and can heartily recommend their service, so to all you software developers – if you have a mobile App and want to expand its market beyond the English speaking world, and you feel like snapping up a deal then head over to their site and check it out!

For more details visit the Tethras site here:

http://www.tethras.com

Here is an interesting video about the new google ‘backend’ concept on the google app engine cloud computing platform.

Google says that these new backend instances will allow GAE software developers to perform more heavyweight computation tasks on the Google Cloud – something that up to now has been very difficult (sometimes impossible) to achieve. We have been struggling to overcome quite a few of these issues on the GAE and are very hopefully that this new functionality will save us a lot of software development time that we would otherise have spent coding around them.

Anyway the video is well worth a watch if you have the time:

http://geektv.info/video/search-engine-tips-e-tricks/google-io-2011-app-engine-backends/

Once again its great to see the google software developers dealing with these issues and coming up with solutions – keep up the good work lads!

Cully & Sully’s Cheffactor eMarketing campaign and competition website has been nominated for an award in the eMarketing section of the All Ireland Marketing Awards. We are proud to have worked on the software and development of the drupal cheffactor site with our good buddies Pride Design, the eMarketing campaign featured tight integration with facebook and we wish the lads the best of luck!

The winners will be announced in the Burlington tonight in Dublin – so good luck guys!

To coincide with Google I/O, Google has released the latest version of their cloud computing platform – Google App Engine 1.5.0, more details can be found here.

There seem to be quite a few interesting additions and changes to the platform especially for those software developers that are involved in doing more heavyweight computing on the backend – we fall into this category and we look froward to trying out the new features!

We have been hitting hard memory limits when parsing relatively medium sized XML files (>700Mib) with the DOM parser – hopefully this problem will disappear with the GAE’s new ‘backend’ framework. Will test & report back!

The Cork Opera House has recently launched its brand-spanking-new website – www.corkoperahouse.ie

It was designed and developed by our web design partners at Pride Design in Cork, we had a great time helping them to build this website which contains loads of multi-media content with facebook and twitter integration. Once again we worked closely with pride on the development of this fully content managed website which was (as always) site built with drupal.

So if you are in Cork for the weekend and fancy a good show, why not have a browse over the site and see if anything catches your eye!

Google has released a new version its App Engine Software platform, the register writes about it here.

Of great interest to us is that the Blob Store API has been upgraded allow programmers to fully interact with blobs, previously data could only be written to a blob in the blobstore via a HTTP post, but now it seems data can be written to a blob, at will, directly from code – i.e. The blobstore API was more or less useless and now it should be useful!

Previously we had to design and implement our own BLOB storage mechanism on top of the Google Datastore to get around these limitations, so hopefully now such homegrown efforts will be no longer required….

Also a new unit test framwork for python has been added, we already happily use the GAE Unit framework on which it seems the new google framework is partly based.

It is great to see google push ahead and continue to support software developers by fixing up and improving their platform – keep up the good work lads; a lot done, a lot more to do!

Our favourite Content Management System – Drupal is moving over from CVS to Git today, meanwhile drupal.org will be down for 12 hours…

More and more people seem to be completely side-stepping subversion and moving straight to Git, is subversion yesterday’s news?

I do like subversion and think it’s an excellent Software Version Control system, but I do feel that Git may be stealing the march on it…

Any thoughts?