uml DIAGRAMS

Engines, Libraries and Tools Tools Discussion
#21

I checked out the Omondo plugin for Eclipse. Later versions do a decent job at generating diagrams… but it doesn’t look like you can do much in the way of modifying code from the diagrams.

I’m hoping that some day a good tool for this will be made (IMHO there is no truly useful UML tool available yet) but I fear any tool that will please me will be way out of my price range :frowning:

TogetherJ is already out of my price range and last time I checked it was next to useless. (The Omondo plugin is much more practical for real use.)

It seems that nobody actually “gets it” when it comes to these sorts of visual tools… the usability factor is astonishingly low.

#22

I too am not 100% satisfied with any of the free UML programs, but of the ones out there I think Visual Paradigm’s community release is the best. It’s a lot more polished than ArgoUML, but has the typical “free version” restrictions (only one of each type of diagram per project, etc).

www.visual-paradigm.com

#23

[quote]I too am not 100% satisfied with any of the free UML programs, but of the ones out there I think Visual Paradigm’s community release is the best. It’s a lot more polished than ArgoUML, but has the typical “free version” restrictions (only one of each type of diagram per project, etc).

www.visual-paradigm.com
[/quote]
Thanks for the hint. Of the many UML tools I’ve taken a (short) look at during the last weeks, your mentioned Visual-Paradigm looks best to me so far. I’ll examine it further.

P.S. A pity that “code importing” is disabled in the free Community Edition. :slight_smile:

#24

For my sins, I’ve started using Visio recently. I recall that it used to be really good back before MS bought it, but very very buggy too.

It seems that between then and Visio 2002/XP MS has removed much of the functionality (boo!) but fixed most of the bugs (yay!). The only bug I found was that “save as WMF” claims to work but actually doesn’t save 99% of the diagrams (this is the kind of bug I’d categorise as “critical; do not ship until fixed”, but clearly MS disagree :frowning: ).

Anyway, Visio is suprisingly excellent as a UML editor, given that it isn’t a specialised UML tool AND it’s designed for the lowest commond denominator (idiot users). [this is quite a sad indictment on the general quality of UML tools].

It’s also - ahem - kind of free. If you can get hold of the MS “trial” (?) pack that costs something like $100 / £75 and contains 5 licenses and full versions of almost every piece of software MS sells, Visio is part of that pack. ISTR you have to be an employee of a company (any one will do) and tell MS that “I’d like to persuade more people in my company to use MS software” or that “the company is considering recommending MS products or reselling them”. Something like that (I’ve never done it myself, but I know plenty of others who have).

#25

P.S. Argo looks like a new version is about to come out (they’re on alpha 2 right now). However, in the meantime, take a look at the P1 bugs before you use, e.g.:

http://argouml.tigris.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2015

(Attempting to “save” fails AND corrupts your save file. Gulp)

My winxp desktop is unavailable for the next few weeks (no more visio :(), so I’m going to check out Gentleware’s Poseidon, the free version. (this is the one based on Argo, but the features list makes it look much more stable and feature-complete). I’ll post back with some feedback soon :).