I got back from San Antonio a week ago.   The jetlag was bad this time; I’d been in the USA for two weeks and it’s taken me a week to get back to normal. San Antonio was a nice place to go.  The river walk was very enjoyable, and we had some great meals looking at it.  I’d just installed Windows 7 on my laptop, and I must say I’ve been enjoying that – it was a seamless process and just about everything seems to work better.

The UML roadmap achieved several important things this time.  First, we had a productive workshop on the Sunday, where many of the RFI respondents presented their views on where UML should be going.  There was a lot of agreement that UML is too complicated and we need to find a way to simplify it for normal people.  But nobody wants to destabilize the market by making major changes to UML, so we need to be measured on how we go about simplifying it.  We agreed that the specification itself is too cumbersome and we need to make it easier to maintain, by reorganizing the document and making better use of tools: so we kicked off a working group to do that.  And pretty much everybody agrees that genuine tool interoperability is increasingly important as the UML market matures, and to get that interoperability to work we need to remove the ambiguities and bugs.

UML 2.3 is essentially done, so it’s now going into the organizational and voting process that will end up with it being formally adopted; and we’ve kicked off a task force to work on UML 2.4.  Hopefully we can get the specification itself tooled up and sorted out over the next year, so that we can nail those outstanding ambiguities and bugs.