Good notation for showing MVC interactions (i.e. Django)

[Alec Taylor]

Good morning,

I'm developing various websites and functionality to cater to various
different use-cases up in Django.

Is there a good notation for showing what behaviour is at each stage,
i.e. using swimlanes?

I use BPMN 2 notation for everything, but I feel I am overusing this,
and that there would be a more suitable one for this.

Thanks for all suggestions,

Alec Taylor

 

[Roy Smith]

Is there a good notation for showing what behaviour is at each stage,
i.e. using swimlanes?

I use BPMN 2 notation for everything, but I feel I am overusing this,
and that there would be a more suitable one for this.

Swimlanes? You mean like http://tinyurl.com/caqf3h5 ? Never used them.
Never used BPMN either. I've found most of these heavyweight modeling
tools to be more of a hinderance than a help. People get all wrapped up
in making pretty diagrams when they should be spending more time writing
code.

I find that when thinking something through at the whiteboard with
another developer, the most common diagram I'll use is a UML sequence
diagram. I drew one on the wall just yesterday. Here's one
(http://www.panix.com/~roy/SongzaSessionHandoff.pdf) I did up a bit
fancier a while ago while working through a gnarly design problem.

As with most things in UML, I find the basic concept useful and don't
sweat the details of what different shaped arrowheads mean or what
flavor of rectangle I'm supposed to be drawing.

 

[Alec Taylor]

An example of a BPMN2 diagram with swimlanes, which I created for a
project: http://i40.tinypic.com/262r6nr.jpg

What I am looking for is something suited towards showing architecture
bounds and the interactions between each section of MVC.

I find that when thinking something through at the whiteboard with
another developer, the most common diagram I'll use is a UML sequence
diagram. I drew one on the wall just yesterday. Here's one
(http://www.panix.com/~roy/SongzaSessionHandoff.pdf) I did up a bit
fancier a while ago while working through a gnarly design problem.

That's a good notation, and one which I will use for RESTful API modelling.

I sometimes use use-case diagrams and quite rarely also use class
diagrams and ER Diagrams.

I use BPMN2 to show logic to both technical and non-technical team-members.