Software development with ConceptDraw DIAGRAM

ConceptDraw is a tool for technical and business graphics. It provides specialists who create graphic documentation with a possibility to focus not on the process of drawing itself but on the essence of the task. For this ConceptDraw features a huge number of ready-to-use objects (4590 for the moment of writing the article), smart connectors, layers, hyperlinks and many other possibilities.

Modern development of program software leads to a large amount of graphic documentation: diagrams describing the work of applications in various cuts and notations, GUI design, documentation on project management. Each of these fields is represented by topical libraries and templates.

To ConceptDraw DIAGRAM new possibilities have been added, thanks to which the program became a sequence higher useful for developers. The most considerable innovations are:

• a set of wizards for automation of widespread tasks
• built-in scripting language, which helps to automate tasks specific for your particular situation.

Let us consider typical applications.

Object-oriented design

Over the recent years object-oriented methodology has become more and more widespread. Thanks to this methodology developers manage to deal with growing complexity of applications. More and more programs are written in such programming languages as C++, Java, Visual Basic and Object Pascal. However, the complexity of the designed systems imposes extended requirements as to design of graphic documentation. ConceptDraw possesses powerful tools for designing of technical documentation for object-oriented projects. The libraries included in the package allow to easily draw class hierarchies, object hierarchies and diagrams of data flows with the use of the most popular notations, including UML and Booch notations. And the library for projecting COM-interfaces will spare developers of ActiveX-servers a headache.

Flowcharts of algorithms and business-processes

	Flowcharting is a conventional way of recording algorithms in a graphic form. ConceptDraw is an ideal means for their creation. Easiness of flowcharting in ConceptDraw is really impressive. This functionality is useful for students and teachers of informatics.
Data Flow Diagram	At development of real application flowcharts are widely used for clearing processes on which business-logics of the application will be based.

Prototyping Graphical User Interface (GUI)

ConceptDraw allows to more tightly draw art designers, managers and users to the process of GUI design. Now libraries of controls for Windows 95, Windows XP, MacOS and MacOS X are available to all of them and they can share their vision of Windows, menu and web-forms on various platforms with developers.

Project management

For a large-scale project to be completed successfully it should be thoroughly projected. One of the generally recognized and visual tools for projecting and tracking timeliness of the work on a project is a Gantt chart. ConceptDraw offers the wizard for automatic creation of Gantt chart.

The other side of the question of project management is the dynamism of changes. Changes in a project and its documentation are made daily. All updates should be done in time and be available to each developer. ConceptDraw offers many methods of solving this question:

• Cross platform compatibility. ConceptDraw is released in two versions: for PC and for Mac. Its files can be easily read by the both versions. It means you can exchange documents with your colleagues and partners working on different platforms.
• Export to HTML provides the possibility of getting a set of ready web-pages based on a ConceptDraw file, which can be displayed in intranet or Internet for all who care.
• Export to PDF and graphic formats are designed, first of all, for sending information via e-mail.

Automation of management and development process

For instance:

• generation of UML diagrams etc. on the ready initial code
• generation of the initial code
• generation of resources for Windows and MacOS, web-forms
• and a lot more

Visualization of data

ConceptDraw is a good means for visualization of information of any kind. The program features powerful graphic possibilities. Thus, on the ready graphic kernel ConceptDraw the rest products of the line have been developed: ConceptDraw PROJECT , ConceptDraw MINDMAP . This powerful graphic kernel (2D-graphics) is supported by a number of open formats (including XML). To this add the flexibility of data processing, connected with the scripting language ConceptDraw Basic (included in version V), and also the flexibility in parameterization of objects, which is provided by the whole table of the object parameters (which is available for editing even from the program's interface). So in the end it becomes clear that visualizing of information in ConceptDraw is a good idea.

So, the typical task for ConceptDraw Basic is to automate the visualization of some data. This data can be obtained as the result of work of an arbitrary application (including ConceptDraw-script) and saved in a text file, ODBC-compatible database or in one of the open formats supported by ConceptDraw. In the first two cases, data will further be read and visualized with the help of ConceptDraw Basic. In case of using a ConceptDraw open format (XML for ConceptDraw or XML for Visio) the obtained document can be simply opened in ConceptDraw, you can then add some details of design and get a presentable diagram. Possibilities of ConceptDraw Basic considerably increase at using in script the functions exported by the shared libraries.

The conclusion is: ConceptDraw is a platform worth considering for writing solutions, connected with data visualization.

Work with databases