Today I decided to start development on an idea I had a couple months earlier. I'll start with a quick intro.
The idea is to develop the ultimate UML tool. A free to use (at least for non-profit and education) UML tool capable of creating a wide range of tightly entwined diagrams. Of course I did some research about tools that are already available. A commonly used tool is Visual Paradigm. Visual paradigm supports a wide range of diagrams and is quite easy to use. However it is a tool that quickly loses great functionality when using the free version. I'm also (ironically as a Java developer) not too fond of Java based desktop applications. I find such applications to feel 'heavy'.
There are more UML applications available (Umbrella, BoUML to name a few), but they support only a couple of diagrams and are not (in my opinion) ready for professional use.
The application I'm developing is currently named OUDS (Open UML Documentation standard, see my earlier post about it), but it needs another name for obvious reasons.
I chose Python as my weapon of choice to develop the application. Python has high performance, is cross platform and seems simple enough. For the GUI I picked wxPython. wxPython seems to provide a native look and feel, so my users will feel home right away. :-)
As each software project starts with requirements gathering I thought I'd start off with creating a solution for this. Obviously the requirements need to be stored in some way. Luckily the guys at omg.org had a (sort of) solution available. Requirements Interchange Format (ReqIF) provides a standardized way to store requirements, just what I needed. I also found a page on the Eclipse site stating plans to use this format for UML tools.
As I am quite new to Python this should be a nice experiment. :-)
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