Well almost. I have to work out a way to get my E-R diagrams into the report; and there are a couple of small inconsistencies that I'll have to sort out. Still, it's looking fairly good. I've never seen a perfect expression of an application in UML. There's always something you could do better: but as long as it's good enough to begin coding from, then it's alright. What I have is good enough to begin coding from.

An E-R diagram, by the way, is an Entity-Relationship diagram. It's the application's data model: the persistent, non-transient data that is. The data that will remain after the application finishes. In other words, it's the database tables you're going to want, and the relationships between them. Some E-R diagrams are very complex. Imagine the data model for an HR/Payroll system, for example; or the model for a Student Record System.

Fortunately, the model for the application I'm writing for this project is very simple: five or six tables at the most. So I don't have much to do. In fact I've done most of it. I just can't work out how to get the CASE tool to include the diagrams in the report.

The rest of the UML report runs to 4,700 words over forty-five pages and includes about thirty diagrams. Since the word limit on the dissertation is 20,000, I think this will have to be an appendix - along with the Statement of Requirements and the Technical Specification. Between them, these three documents would probably account for nearly the whole of the word count if I were to include them in the body of the dissertation.

Next week, I'm going to try to get Apache up and running using Mono for .aspx pages. In other words I'm going to try to get my Linux Web server to run .NET applications using the Apache Web server as opposed to the XSP Web server I was playing with last week. Then I'll decide which option I'm going to take. I really want the application to run on port 80, the usual http port. If I'm going to do that, Apache might be a better bet. It does serve 70% of the world's Web pages after all.

Perhaps I'll have more to say about Web servers and how they work next week.