I’m looking for a good UML editor that supports asynchronous calls well in sequence diagrams. Star UML can do them but has a few flaws, UMLet is great but a little buggy and problematic and Argo UML just doesn’t do it.
I don’t know exactly, if the requested feature is available in it, but Jude UML is worth a look.
Ah yes, Jude is excellent - although it does not quite do what I wanted it to do. I think that I would have to do such a task in Dia, but I can find an alternative method to display the behaviour.
For what it’s worth, I am happy with Dia. It’s free and runs on all the operating systems I use. Sequence diagrams are not quite as polished as in other tools, but personally I like the lack of a metamodel: I don’t want code generation, just pictures.
Dia is, frankly, horrid. It’s the “if you don’t mind being about 10 years behind the curve” editor. You are a braver person than I am, or you don’t know what you’re missing :P. You will have to learn how to write UML properly to use any real UML editor, but it very quickly saves you time in the longrun.
At the moment, if you can afford it, I would very highly recommend Enterprise Architect. But I managed to get my employer to buy a copy, so I didn’t have to pay for it.
[quote=“blahblahblahh,post:6,topic:30482”]
Naughty naughty, well I found Dia was fine to use. You can do REAL UML, most packages don’t fully support all possibilities that are functionally correct. Having said that I really liked Borland’s Together plugin, simply amazing.
This article is five years old but still holds true:
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-01-2002/jw-0111-ootools.html
The best editor for UML is a whiteboard. In my zeal for technology, I neglected to mention this in my first post.
Also, @blah^3: for what it’s worth, I’ve used Rose, Visio, Argo, Kivio, Posiedon, Umbrello, and Dia, and evaluated a handful of other UML tools, and I found Dia to suit my needs best. My needs include ease of use, cross-platform capability (Win&Lin), export to eps for easy inclusion in LaTeX documents, and no unnecessarily linking to a metamodel or other CASE fluff. Free and easy to install are gravy, since they facilitate recommendation to students. Dia wins in all these categories, of the tools I have evaluated. I would like to know the relative merits of the tool you recommend. The screenshots at http://www.sparxsystems.com.au/platforms/uml_tool.html are unimpressive: they could be mimicked or improved in any of the tools I mentioned above.
User interface features can’t really be seen, like say [good] automatic laying out of class diagrams. Code generation and the like.
Poseidon is a nice UML 2.0 Editor but you can’t save or
print diagrams with the (free) community edition.