Reverse engineering OO perl code

I suspect this question has been asked before, and I suspect the answer
may be "It's not practical.", but from a couple quick searches in
google groups I could not find anything. (Maybe I picked the wrong
search words.)

My question is Are there any tools available to effectively reverse
engineer existing, relatively well-constructed OO Perl code to produce
(or aid in producing) design artifacts/documentation, such as UML
diagrams/code or diagrams in other notations? (Free, FOSS, or not-free)

It seems that this would be very valuable in some situations, but I've
not seen any evidence of such tools. Perhaps this is because the task
is too complex to be done for real code.


Thanks.

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Re: Reverse engineering OO perl code

Jim Cochrane wrote:
> I suspect this question has been asked before, and I suspect the answer
> may be "It's not practical.", but from a couple quick searches in
> google groups I could not find anything. (Maybe I picked the wrong
> search words.)
>
> My question is Are there any tools available to effectively reverse
> engineer existing, relatively well-constructed OO Perl code to produce
> (or aid in producing) design artifacts/documentation, such as UML
> diagrams/code or diagrams in other notations? (Free, FOSS, or not-free)
>
> It seems that this would be very valuable in some situations, but I've
> not seen any evidence of such tools. Perhaps this is because the task
> is too complex to be done for real code.

There are a number out there, but the only one with which I am familiar
is Autodia.

Mark

Re: Reverse engineering OO perl code

Quoth Jim Cochrane :
> I suspect this question has been asked before, and I suspect the answer
> may be "It's not practical.", but from a couple quick searches in
> google groups I could not find anything. (Maybe I picked the wrong
> search words.)
>
> My question is Are there any tools available to effectively reverse
> engineer existing, relatively well-constructed OO Perl code to produce
> (or aid in producing) design artifacts/documentation, such as UML
> diagrams/code or diagrams in other notations? (Free, FOSS, or not-free)

A search for UML on search.cpan.org produces several results. I've not
used any of them, so I can't comment on their usefulness.

Ben

Re: Reverse engineering OO perl code

On 2007-08-29, Mark Clements wrote:
> Jim Cochrane wrote:
>> I suspect this question has been asked before, and I suspect the answer
>> may be "It's not practical.", but from a couple quick searches in
>> google groups I could not find anything. (Maybe I picked the wrong
>> search words.)
>>
>> My question is Are there any tools available to effectively reverse
>> engineer existing, relatively well-constructed OO Perl code to produce
>> (or aid in producing) design artifacts/documentation, such as UML
>> diagrams/code or diagrams in other notations? (Free, FOSS, or not-free)
>>
>> It seems that this would be very valuable in some situations, but I've
>> not seen any evidence of such tools. Perhaps this is because the task
>> is too complex to be done for real code.
>
> There are a number out there, but the only one with which I am familiar
> is Autodia.
>
> Mark

Thanks much for the recommendation.

I installed autodia and tried it out a bit and it looks like it will
probably provide what I need.

Thanks also to Ben Morrow on his suggestion to check out modules on
cpan. I checked that out and found UML::Class::Simple, with
umlclass.pl.


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