Launching Structura

We at Metadev are releasing Structura.

What is Structura?

Strcutura is graphical editor for a UML like Class Model Editor designed for the web & the AI era.

Main features

• Graphical editor.
• Suport for namespaces, classes, enumerations, associations, inheritance, properties and stereotypes (or decorators).
• Compact textual format (AI friendly).
• Artifical Intelligence Integration (meet Zeus, the assistant). Ask him to create a complete model from scratch or to explain a given one.
• Extensible model validation.
• Poweful and extensible high quality code generation.
• Easy to interop from & to.

Why?

LLMs are rapidly changing the way software is developed. While they provide quick discardable prototypes, they can quickly turn into technical debt when proof-of-concept code is promoted to production.

In this scenario, the average developer can not cope with the complexity and the project is in real risk of derailment.

Models play a crucial role when selecting the adequate level of abstraction to describe the system design: high enough to discard implementation details and be concise but also low enough to be formal and unambiguous to constrain the domain to match the requirements.

We believe the developers should stay in control and use AI as an exoskeleton able to boost their productivity without sacrifing quality or incurring technical debt.

At Metadev we use models all the time as the main source of truth of the development (aka MDE), where the value relies on the model (to be curated) more than code (discardable when technology changes).

In this case, this allows putting the developer in the lead position to follow the workflow:

1. create your model,
2. use the AI (if you want to) to work at the right level of abstraction for building the domain language (as in Domain Driven Design) to curate your model,
3. validate your model for quality before any translation,
4. then select the best architecture for the project and use deterministic code generation to enforce policies and avoid hallucinations introduced by non deterministic AIs.

Therefore, Structura is our tooling to support this way of building.

Demo

See the short video

Uses cases

You can use Structura for:

• Making the architecture your Software Systems that a team (human or not) can follow
• Building UML Class Models (or Conceptual Models)
• Building Ontologies
• Prototyping your Software
• Comunicating design alternatives with peers
• Cheap & fast prototyping
• Visualizing the structure of code
• Validating models and checking for model inconsistencies
• Generating the foundation for a system with a selected architecture and enforcing well-known patterns for best practices and your code conventions
• Enforcing policies by design at code generation level
• Obtaining the 80% of the code applying the 20% of the effort (following Pareto's rule)

Roadmap

Potential incomming features:

• Real-time model collaboration as explained here.
• More architectures & code generators.
• Model reverse enginering from databases.
• Shareable models on the web with a permalink.
• AI refactors (work in progress).
• Model versioning & diffing.

Anything missing? Feel free to let us know your ideas to improve it.

Beta open

The beta is now open. Feel free to test it for free and give us feedback to make it better.

Try it at Structura.

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Metadev. Simplifying complexity