N-Tiered Application Development Tool
I am a beginner in medium sized web application design. I usually like to design from the top down, that is, start at the highest level and work my way down. I plan on having the following layers:
- Presentation (PHP / Ajax)
- Business logic
- Data access
- Database
Now I would like to start drawing the main objects in each layer and the interaction between the layers. Is there a tool more specific for this purpose than just using a graphics / graphics tool like Visio?
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This is what the UML is for. There are many UML diagram editors. I hesitate to recommend one by one though. The degree is (probably) less than that of source editors, but users still tend to form strong opinions about which ones are good, bad, or indifferent, so trying to recommend it seems (to me) rather futile.
One piece of advice I would give is not to get too wrapped up in the UML - it allows you to specify a lot of details, often relatively subtly (like whether the arrow head is empty or filled), diagramming the main classes and how they interact at a high level extremely useful - but it's easy to go overboard and start trying to include over-detailing. This can be a huge waste of time. Worse, it can lock your thinking into one particular design too early in the process, before you've done enough to make sure the design is really right.
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