29 Jan 2000

© © 
2000 
Applied
Information
Science

Remember, we do not sell any products nor do we represent any vendors. You can contact them all directly from the links above.

We have had the luxury of building our own ideal CASE modeling tool. Since we believe that Object Role Modeling is the only modeling method which is both mathematically provable and completely practical, we insisted on adopting ORM. On the other had, having come to absolute brick walls in four major attempts to harness VisioModeler, we have abandoned that implementation and kept the method.

As you might deduce from the picture above, we used Visio as the drawing engine. What you can't see is that the Visio diagram connects directly to a repository in a database schema of our own design (running, in this case, on SQL Server V7.0). This means that the repository is inherently multi-user (a frequent enterprise modeling requirement). The repository, being relational, gives direct access to its contents in any number of standard SQL views and queries.. Our tool provides a blend of:

InfoModeler's Object Role Modeling for conceptual modeling from business rules

PowerDesigner's fast, easy graphic interface

Silverrun Enterprise Version's real-time multi-user database repository

System Architect's infinite extensibility

ER/Studio's intuitive modern GUI

In addition, we have integrated capabilities to model business rules and external (e.g., presentation) contexts. From our repository we generate DDL, DML to execute business rules, client side code (if elected) to do the same, and immediately usable UI. And it's round trip - change or remove an element in the model and that is reflected in the generated code.

But - as of this writing, this is an unpackaged work in progress, for internal use only. and we really have no intention of getting in the tools business. However, we are quite enthusiastic about the possibilities which this exercise demonstrates. if you want to build your own tools, methods, or complete methodology, AIS can help ...