Why Is Project Ottawa Important?
We [FEDs*] have tools for building,
We just don’t have tools for describing what we build.
FEDs* build things – things called web applications. We use code, graphics, etc. We have tools at our disposal to do this. But there is one problem. Architects and engineers can create blueprints and models to display their project.
We don’t.
We have have code and content. But all of this is just words without context. And unless your are willing to search and dig through all the code and comments, its still pretty useless.
What I did with Project Ottawa was take the patterns of building – views, code blocks, scripts – and create visual symbols with reference to these items. Here, the advantage of Ottawa is giving a visual description of the web application. Not just its parts but also its interactions and their relationships among the various parts. Its not a comprehensive view, it just has to be as concise as possible without losing too much precision. And the possibility of manipulating this data to do more interesting things in the future.
* FEDs – Front-End Developers