thank you for your answers.
First of all let me say that it is not my intention to scratch anybody’s varnish :-).
It is an attempt to make a very good thing a tiny bit better, if any possible.
As far as I’ve seen userfrosting is an excellent made technical platform to develop and to distribute the code needed for user administration. The concept, the environment and a lot more are documented in depth and with a lot of knowledge for these two steps of application development. And it consists of a very well made operating application as well. Great job, and highly appreciated as well.
Amos,
what I mean is something different. Even if you’re able to read a code, you will often base on assumptions concerning a certain object and its behaviour. Reverse engineering is time consuming, frustrating and often not very successful. I think that a proper and correct view based on a documentation is a better approach.
Alex,
yes, I can imagine to do something for this. If there’s a way you see, please tell me.
This could deliver a base to discuss, and to refine the definition and the meaning of terms within this system.
I was on the lookout for some open source software to create and maintain a glossary, but with not much success so far. Any ideas to this?
To everybody
Concerning a glossary, I found this one:
If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.
Confucius, Rectification of Words
Misunderstandings of every kind seem to be a very old problem.
But what I adressed in my two other posts goes a bit further.
To understand what an application or a system is and what it does, one should now the answers to two different questions. And one must understand the main difference between these two answers as well:
Question one: “Who has what, when, where, how, and why”?
Question two: “Who does what, when, where, how, and why”?
The two answers are different.
The first one describes a given object with its attributes (what) at a given point in time (when), its location in a certain environment (where), its form (how), and its purpose (why). This is static snapshot.
The second one describes an activity or a process (what is done with an object by whom and why).
An activity or a process is always triggered by an event, and it has an input and an output. It starts, gets an input, delivers an output and ends.
For a proper understanding of every system it is crucial to know the big difference between these two questions.
In a system documentation these two different answers are often described in two different documents:
A component model (static view with all parts and their relationships) and an operational model (dynamic behaviour of componenents and their realtionships). The base for both are business requirements. A business requirement defines what the business want to have a given point in time.
But to create a documentation covering these two questions and answers require a lot of additional work.
And this could done most probably only by the people that have developed a system (based on not yet documented answers to these two questions). They had a goal in mind at the real beginning - otherwise there would be no system and no application here at all ;-).
What do you think? Please tell me. Thanx.