Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
One of the first things I do when I'm on a new project is design a database model. To visualize the model I use a 7 year old version of Smartdraw. Maybe it's time for something new. What is the ultimate program to make a drawing of a database model. Smartdraw is for Windows only. Is there something that can be used on unix as well?
The best tool is pencil and paper.
Perhaps not the answer you are looking for, but sometimes the most simple solution is the best. :-)
A whiteboard (and camera to take a picture afterwards)
Your brain is the best drawing tool.
I prefer to develop a database schema in a simple text file.
At first it contains just the table names, attributes and foreign keys:
company:
company_name
...
employee:
name
age
company_name -> company
...
...:
The syntax is not important.
It just needs to be clearly arranged and easy to change.
Later I add types and CHECK() constraints,
so the text file gradually transforms into valid SQL code.
Using a drawing tool in that early stage is just distracting,
because it encourages to waste your time with moving reactangles.
Instead, let your brain build a picture of the schema
in the same way it creates fantasy pictures while reading a book.
As the schema grows,
it becomes necessary to support the brain by creating an overview.
Here, however, pencil and paper are faster than any drawing software.
Also note that there is no need to clutter an overview with unimportant details.
Just sketch the table names and the most important relationships (foreign keys).
Any further details will decrease the value of this overview.
However, if you really feel more comfortable with extremely detailed graphics than with text files and overview graphics, you might want to try
DBDesigner4
or
WWW SQL Designer.
I'm happy using Sybase PowerDesigner for years now.
Did you take a look at Visio 2007 SQL Server Add-In?
You can find it here: http://dbalink.wordpress.com/2008/04/24/microsoft-office-visio-2007-professional-sql-server-add-in/
WWW SQL Designer is one of the best that I've seen, which is pretty amazing since it is all javascript. It can also import and export xml and sql code of everything you draw. And they've added nifty bezier curves since I last used it.
I don't know if it's the "ultimate" program for drawing database models, but I use Visio. Unfortunately, it only runs in Windows.
On the upside, I can create my own shapes, or modify existing ones, and save them in collections called stencils. I can also make my shapes "smart" by programming them to do various things when I double click on them.
I use a whiteboard and a camera as well. I second the pencil and paper. I keep a pen(cil) and pad of paper with me almost always because I am forever designing something in my head and need to jot it down. I like Visio as well but my favorite software program to use has always been ERWin. The price of that thing is just way out line, but it is great.
I like ERWin. Not Cheap, but it can reverse engineer or do initial design + generate CRUD and manipulate db structure. Viso is pretty good for this too, but its not as complete and of course as strong MS SQL leanings is capabilities.
I used to use Visio, but if your database server is MySQL, try MySQL Workbench. It has a linux version as well as a win32 version. Like their other GUI products it has its fair share of quirks, but it works quite well and has the ability to create a diagram of a schema and a schema from a diagram.
I also agree that a pencil and paper, or whiteboard and camera is a great way to sketch things out, but I do like the GUI tools for putting down an idea which is a bit more well formed or complicated.
I like to use the open-source mind-mapping program Freemind. It's similar to designing with pencil and paper in that there's not a lot of surface complexity to interrupt the design process.
But it has two huge advantages over paper/pencil:
node folding
easy drag-and-drop re-arranging
It is very easy to navigate the interface without using the mouse within about five minutes. You can add as many or as few details as you like and can always fold up the details to de-clutter your view. Here's a sample screenshot:
The circles at the ends of the Departments, Employees, and Hours tables indicate that there are more nodes that are folded up. You can go crazy with different fonts, background colors, and even HTML formatting. I just did a [Ctrl]-[B] to make my table names Bold.
FreeMind--and mind-mapping software in general--provides its biggest benefit by staying out of the way of the creative process. It's the first tool I turn to when starting a new project from scratch.
NOTE: I've only ever used the program on Windows, but it is available on Linux.
DIA is not bad, and there are tools to actually generate some code from some types of models. If you are using PostgreSQL, there is even a tool for going the other way, pg-autodoc.
DIA is available for Unix, and I believe Windows as well.
I used to use Viso but now, as I'm more Mac based I use Omnigraffle.
I do have to admit though, as andyUK does, I do a rough sketch on paper.
It also depends on what Database you're using. If it's MySQL then there are quite a few visual development tools available, just have a google
There may be more technical programs, but I use SmartDraw. I would also like to note that 'ultimate' is up to your circumstances. Find what works best for you or you and your company. What works for you is the 'ultimate'.
Brainstorm/sketch the database on paper/whiteboard first, and then go with a diagram tool.
Which tool depends on your target database. We use SQL Server and thus the designer in SQL Server Management Studio works great for us, since we create the database itself at the same time.
For linux I use umbrello
If you're looking for a cheap solution/tool without any reverse/forward engineering capabilities, MS Visio might be your best bet. However, if you're planning to invest some money toward ERD tool, spend it on ER/Studio.
I used to use and be champion of ERWIN. As soon as I started to use ER/Studio, I became fan of it. I'm an enterprise data architect at one of the Fortune 100 company and I don't know how to get my work done without it.
PS: I don't have no affiliations with any of those products and companies.
OpenOffice has a vector drawing tool, and Inkscape is a another good one.
Otherwise, you can use Graphviz (dot language) to generate such diagram out of a textual description.
There are also some tools to generate such diagram out of an existing database (I first thought it was what you were asking).
If you don't need much take Dia.
I used Power Designer. It's powerful but rather complex.
Related
I'm planning to become a maths teacher next year. Since work is pretty quiet for me at the moment, I want to build a database of maths questions so that I have resources to work with next year. Rmarkdown and R-Exams look promising, but there are a few things I'm not yet clear about.
The list below shows my requirements. Those items in italics are requirements that I want input on.
What I must be able to do
Database of questions that I can mix-and-match into quizzes.
Export to both PDF and HTML.
Not just multiple choice. Must have at minimum the ability to just display the question
or to display the question followed by space left afterwards.
To be able to display or hide solutions.
Question randomisation
What I would like to be able to do
Export quizzes to a variety of Learning Management Systems.
Grade questions with a Computer Algebra System.
I listed this one because I've seen people use moodle STACK with excellent results. However, it doesn't meet my portability requirements.
The randomization and mix-and-match strategy is at the very core of R/exams so clearly this is supported. The export to different output formats (PDF, HTML, Docx, different learning management systems) is also fundamental feature of R/exams, see: http://www.R-exams.org/intro/oneforall/.
How to do the fine control of the layout in PDF exports (title page, hiding solutions, spacing between questions, etc.) is summarized in the vignette("exams", package = "exams") [PDF]. There are also various questions related to the exams2pdf() interface here on StackOverflow.
As for grading I'm not sure what this should look like. It seems to me to be orthogonal to what R/exams does. But maybe I'm missing the point here. If you correct quizzes in PDF format you will typically assign points "by hand" - and if you are using a learning management system, that will assign the points. And then based on the points you can assign grades in any tool you like.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
I have a Cricket management game (like Football Manager) written in VB 6.0 long back. It uses MS-Access as it's back-end and win-32 API calls to draw UI screens. It's a reasonably big game with 90,000+ lines of code.
Now, I want to re-write the game using other technologies like Java, Python, C++ etc. Basically I want to get out of Microsoft technologies (and preferably move to technologies that are available for free).
So, please help me out in choosing right technologies for Application-Logic, UI and Database. Below are my broader requirements regarding the three layers.
Application-Logic:
The game needs to make 1000s of calculations on in-memory data and constantly write that data to text files (Save game files). It also needs to do very fast database operations.
UI:
The UI need not be very robust. The only requirement is to be able to develop good looking screens with minimal animation effects. Below are the links to current screen images for your reference.
http://imageshack.us/g/148/89832593.png/
I might also add 2D graphics in the future.
Database:
The database contains around 20 tables with the larger tables containing up to 300000 records. Again, I want to use a free database like MySQL or flat text files. I am very curious to know about the database used by games like "Football Manager" or "Cricket Coach 2011"
Note: Please don't consider the efforts required to learn the proposed technologies. I will take care of them.
Update:
Now that I have decided to go ahead with C++ and SQLite, please direct me regarding the IDE and basic Tools/Libraries I should be using to start with.
I am already experienced in working with "Visual Studio" and "Eclipse". Can I use one of them? or can I go with QT (I read that QT is cross platform, but, is it just for mobile development or can I use it for desktop apps too)?
And,
How critical is the IDE selection initially?
Can I move to a different IDE at a later stage?
If I use Visual Studio, am I getting bound to Microsoft technologies?
If possible, please give me links to any examples to develop screens as in the links I provided above.
[I see now that an "online game" was an assumption on my part. So keep that in mind as you read this.]
I would take into consideration your hosting options. If you want to open-source this or operate it on a shoe-string budget, and run it on the widest array of available hosting services, then you probably want to go with LAMP technologies. This would rule out my favorite language, Java, as the underlying choice of language. PHP is almost always available on inexpensive hosting options. Perl and then Python are also available on many hosts, but PHP is practically guaranteed these days.
If however, you'll be hosting this in a "whatever it takes" environment, I'm a big fan of Java, Tomcat, JBoss, etc. But those technologies, while powerful, take a lot of time to ramp up to use, but more importantly, to use effectively and efficiently.
MySQL is a great choice these days for databases. Postgresql is another free option (in some ways, maybe free-er than MySQL, given MySQL's Oracle connection.) But MySQL is likely to be more readily available on a lot of inexpensive hosts. MySQL also qualifies under "very fast operation."
Regardless of database choice, do what you can to abstract your database code so that should you want to change (or need to change) you can do it with minimal fuss. PHP and Java both have well worn ORMs to help you in this regard.
It'd be interesting to see what kind of data models are used in a game like a * Manager title. I suspect it maps well to a relational database. But I'm personally on the lookout for a good reason to dabble with a NoSQL solution.
HTML and CSS for the client to start.
For a database, I would recommend SQLite: http://sqlite.org/
It's free, fast, and serverless. Serverless being key. There are some drawbacks that you can read about on their website, but for a stand-alone application, it should be much better than using text files.
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 11 years ago.
Improve this question
What features should "Tomorrow's" wikis include? How might they incorporate Web 2.0 features like AJAX? What other features are they currently missing? What do you want to see from the next release of your favorite Wiki?
Edit: How might a Wiki be integrated into other products? What "neat uses" could wikis have?
Preview-as-you-type works very nicely indeed here on Stack Overflow. Many wikis don't do that.
Make it really easy to link between pages, eg. that, as you type, the wiki finds likely pages you may be referring to. That way you can make links without having to know the exact title of a target page, and bouncing on the shift key to WriteInCamelCase, or throwing in square brackets. Make it very easy to link to other websites outside the wiki, too (and by "easy" I do not mean like wikisisters, which, if I remember correctly, is like foowiki:ALinkLikeThis).
Similarly, if you can generate links within text automatically, you could, for example, have a mail system that wikifies your email. You create a wiki page, say, for Joel Spolsky, and references to Joel emails in your inbox become links to that page, which you can find by clicking "what links here". (This probably needs something along the lines of Bayesian filtering to prune the stray references to other Joels... your Bayesian Classifier learns that if the context is smart and getting things done, it's Spolsky. If it's flying Viking kittens, it's morely likely Joel Veich).
A variety of RSS feeds for tracking changes would nice, too. (Diffs, full text, changes on pages I've edited, ...)
Wikipedia has grown a fairly colossal categorisation system ("Fictional Cats", anyone?); laying a taxonomy over a wiki's flat namespace could provide another way for users to find their way around. Wikipedia's doing this a little, but in fairly limited ways so far: there are links to the relevant category lists, but you can't, for example, look for a composer called "Smith".
Similarly, wikis give you this big graph of interconnected nodes, of how closely your community sees the relevant concepts as being. Is that interesting? Is that useful? Does anyone who isn't google want to think about this stuff?
PS. If you believe Paul Graham's definition of Web 2.0 as "Democracy, Don't Maltreat Users, and Javascript works now", wikis are two thirds Web 2.0 already.
I am personally already tired of wikis. Wiki as a software is outdated, now it is about wiki as a feature (like my favorite new website, stack overflow).
The main advantage of community wiki — more editing — came into existence when we introduced "Suggested Edits".
With "Suggested Edits", anyone, even an anonymous user, can edit anything — so long as another experienced user reviews and approves their edit.
I'm in the process of choosing a wiki tool, and have looked at numerous packages over the past week. I'm sure there are dozens I haven't even heard of yet, probably good ones. But in general, here's my "beginner's mind" take on the problem.
Wiki markup should be abandoned. A wiki that is limited to wiki markup will only be useful to 'nix hacks and others who get excited about doing things the hard way and insisting that everybody else is stupid. I mean, Morse code is fine with me personally; I don't get what was wrong with a nice, clean dash-dot-dash. Or smoke signals, they were nice, except for the carbon footprint. But times change, and we have to change with them.
Real users (business users, customers, clients) want rich text editing. Period. And when a wiki tries to support both rich text and wiki markup, the results are not pretty. The model is confusing and (apparently) difficult to implement. The fckeditor extension at wikiwiki is a nightmare, for example. It's just not worth it.
Wikis need better access control. The idea that all content should be open to everyone is fine for an open, public, non-profit wiki like this one. But in the business world, that's not how it works. Restricting access is not evil, it's reality. Wiki tools need to do a much better job of providing access control: access to pages and groups of pages based on role or group membership, where groups can be formed by anyone on an ad hoc basis and users can belong to multiple groups and pages can be accessible to multiple groups, at the whim of the page's creator.
Those are the two things that I want, above all else, and I haven't found it in open source, at least not out of the box. Which, of course, is why open source is open source.
There's been some interesting work using wikis for testing and software development. EG, movement towards literate programming -- allowing pages to exist as both code and documentation that is compiled down into one or the other (or, I suppose, both simultaneously).
They have a regular session about this at the annual WikiSym conference.
I think one direction of Wikis is going from open ended collections of documents to an "everyone can edit but with more structure" applications like SO.
Another direction that I've seen is more direct integration with other project support tools, so project planning, issue management, and all that stuff.
Personally, I think the next big direction is going to be some sort of multimedia based Wiki, not just a Wiki where multimedia can be embedded in the text.
I really like MediaWiki. It's widely used and free/Free. The markup syntax is straightforward and allows you to do enough basic styling that you don't need to use custom HTML or to use a WYSIWYG. I assume by "sexy web 2.0" you mean Flash/AJAX, but I like MediaWiki because it works cleanly with basic HTML/Javascript (you don't have to wait for custom widgets to load, etc...).
What makes wikis reach their potential of usefulness is the community that develops around them more than the software itself. You need to find a niche where people are both passionate about (but not criminally insane about) the central topic and have enough technical prowess to log on to a website and edit some text.
"Wiki" is ultimately just a pattern:
Open editing by all/most visitors
Integrated revision tracking and rollback to reduce the cost of mistakes
Simple syntax for cross-linking between articles, and auto-creation of stub articles when referenced
That's not a perfect description, but it's a combination that isn't particularly magic. Successful wikis combine those things with a critical mass of people creating and maintaining content.
The next step, IMO, is less about web 2.0 shininess and more about the integration of better structural information. Adding any metadata beyond "this points to that" is an exercise in brute force hand-markup. Maybe microformats? Maybe the development of more structured knowledgebase software that uses wiki-ish editing UI but a smarter backend? I'm not sure, but I think better handling of the structured data is really the next wave.
Extensibility.
Check out DekiWiki, they are doing an excellent job with this.
DekiWiki extensions
The wiki-of-the-future will be completely editable online, concurrently by everyone. Check out EtherPad for a demo of the techonology.
For me, in terms of Enterprise style uses for a wiki, I have a couple of thoughts;
An effective way to keep and synchronise a central, web based wiki with multiple, offline, desktop style wiki's for people on the go
To move towards wiki as a function as opposed to wiki as a system, so we can integrate the wiki collaborative system into other things
Could some one point to articles / books on how to create good flow chart diagrams?
BoUML-it's free!
I've used this open source tool for the last 6 months at work to create UML diagrams:
bouml.free.fr/
I've used it on both a Macbook running OS X, as well as Ubuntu Linux on a desktop, both with success. It also does codegen (although I haven't used this feature myself). If you create a diagram from within BoUML, you can right click ->Tools->HTML etc,etc., and it and actually generate the diagram -- this will create a whole tree of html, css, etc., and include a .png file which you can later choose to import into a Word-like document.
If you're new to UML, and would like to explore that route, I suggest UML Distilled by Martin Fowler as a way to quickly ramp up. I still use this as a reference when I'm putting diagrams together and I forget some syntactical detail ;) The nice thing about UML is that most programmers will understand it. If you don't want to buy a book you can, of course, Google 'UML tutorial' and get a slew of free info.
Non-UML:
You can also use open office's draw application to do some simple flow charting. It has some nice non-uml shapes, so if you're not trying to be 'strict' in the sense of conforming to UML, and just want a simple flow chart, that may be a good choice.
Check this one out:
http://drakon-editor.sourceforge.net/DRAKON.pdf
Tutorial here.
Also get a copy of Microsoft Visio.
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 11 years ago.
Improve this question
I've always wanted to sketch all ideas I come up with in the computer instead of on paper, but everyone knows that sketching with good 'ol fashioned pen and paper beats the crap out of trying to do it with a mouse (or even worse, a touch pad).
So I turn to stack overflow with this question: Does any one of you know a magic program that will help in sketching out diagrams, ideas, etc. with decent speed on a computer?
I'm not after something that will do pretty diagrams (that take ages to do, btw.) like Visio, Dia (kudos the the Dia developers though, kick ass app), etc. but for jotting down quick ideas and drawing early work flow sketches, etc.
(I know - a wacom board, but it's not really feasible to carry it around with your laptop)
I still go for a whiteboard and a decent camera on the mobile phone.
Normally when working on the whiteboard, we often go through a phase of erasing out all the unimportant stuff after we've worked out what the real essence of the problem and the solution. So we put some nice pictures on the wiki ;)
Did you consider some kind of mind-mapping application ?
PersonalBrain is quite handy for that type of task, even though the "diagram" feature is quite limited.
alt text http://www.thebrain.com/site/personalbrain/learningzone/topUses/awareness3.png
I'm actually a big fan of OneNote. It's great for entering text and organizing it in a visual way.
This won't do for situations where you're working with other people, but I often do my brain-storming with GraphViz.
GraphViz gives you the dot and neato languages for drawing graphs. So you start jotting down items and the relationships between them in your favourite text editor:
graph brainstorm {
release -- documentation
release -- "bug fixes"
release -- enhancements
documentation -- "release notes"
documentation -- "user guide"
enhancements -- "user requests" -- "support team"
enhancements -- marketing -- demo
}
You can then turn this into a image:
neato diagram http://share4pic.com/images/2/9/3/2935067.jpg
There are lots of options for formatting and layout and so on if you want to prettify the output.
It doesn't work for idea's or diagrams, but i found this very impressive: I love sketch. Hopefully, we'll see similar tools in the future for other forms of information.
When i was still using windows i used adobe illustrator and a wacom tabled for sketching diagrams (example). Powerfull, but a steep learning curve, if you just want to do sketching.
On linux i use Inkscape (with a wacom tablet). It's not as powerful as illustrator, but it gets the job done. (example).
I would love to use a sketching tool for creating presentations. Have a number of slides on my screen, and just sketch to contents of every sheet, also using the wacom to drag and drop the slides in the right order, etc.
There was a research project called SILK (Sketching Interfaces Like Krazy) a few years ago (mid 90s) at Carnegie-Mellon. Two papers that talked about the work are Interactive Sketching for the Early Stages of User Interface Design and Just Draw It! Programming by Sketching Storyboards.
I thought their ideas were very cool, but the project seems to have blown away. I'm mentioning it here for two reasons:
To support the questioner's idea that this would be A Very Good Thing for early design stages, and
In hopes that someone else will have more luck than I did in finding out what happened to SILK (or at least the prototypes).
I know you are "not after something that will do pretty diagrams".
However, I believe this new web flash-based application LovelyCharts might be oo assistance for quick (and nice too) diagrams, and can be compliant with your goal to "jotting down quick ideas and drawing early work flow sketches, etc."
Example of work flow sketch:
The closest thing to the feeling of writing on paper with pencil or pen that I have found is a graphics tablet (relatively inexpensive and small Wacom Bamboo is enough) with Autodesk's SketchBook Pro software.
Try the trial (if you have graphics tablet handy, not really the same with a mouse), it's amazing how natural digital drawing feels with that app.
Depending on how close you are to implementing something, balsamiq mockups may be what you want. I find it great for mocking up user interfaces, and it's probably not a bad way to start sketching a development idea.
Autodesk Sketchbook Pro is the closest I've come to a whiteboard after an extensive search. Minimal controls, yet enough. It's also attractively priced, in line with its simplicty.
Maybe you should consider buying a Graphic Tablet .
I recommend Wacom Bamboo
I wouldn't suggest it, but people have mentioned mind-mapping products and even OneNote (¡sin comentarios!), so I'll plug my TheKBase Desktop and it's Cloud brother, TheKBase Web. NO, they will not help you draw things like on paper, but in many cases, diagrams are not what you need. You want to organize your ideas and whip them into shape.
If you insist on diagramming, 30x less annoying than Visio is SmartDraw (sorry for the Spanish grammar).
Moleskin for the win!