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Chapter 6. A Sequence Diagram Editor for BlueJ
lifelines. Of course this is a big limitation, but when beginners draw sequence diagrams these notations are mostly (only) used. Since the editor must not be too
complex and difficult to use this subset of all notational possibilities will probably
be enough.
The sequence diagrams that are drawn should also be able to be saved and
opened later on. There were no special requirements how the sequence diagrams
should be saved and in what form. Though it seemed natural that sequence diagrams belonging to a certain project should be saved in the same directory as the
project it belongs to.
6.2
6.2.1
Design
The Graphical User Interface
The first thing that I started with was the Graphical User Interface (GUI). The main
thing was that it should be easy and intuitive to use and not differ from the GUI of
BlueJ too much, see figures 6.1 and 6.2. Since they are beginners who will use the
editor it should not include too much functionality and the program should not take
a long time to understand and learn. The window of the editor contains a drawing
area, where the sequence diagram is drawn, some menus in the top of the window
and some icons that are used to draw the sequence diagram. The icons represent
an actor, an object, a message and notes for the diagram. The GUI is implemented
using Java’s swing-library, see http://java.sun.com.
Figure 6.1. The window of the sequence diagram editor.