Posted under UML
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Tags Design, Java, UML
This review compares open source UML tools. Unlike a number of other reviews I read, it is fairly recent (02/2009) so well worth a read. The conclusion is as follows :-
From the perspective of a reviewer with no specific software development project in mind, the most feature-laden option is the Papyrus / Acceleo combination. If your primary IDE is Eclipse, you will benefit from having your modeling software running in the same environment as your active code editor. For Java programmers using Netbeans, the same can said of its modeling tool. BOUML, while superb in its own right, is the vision of a single author and, as such, enterprise development institutions may be hesitant to adopt it. If you don’t mind breaking away from your IDE, give Taylor a test drive.
This Eclipse post gives a comparison of UML Tools which are Eclipse Plugins. I tried several different versions of the Eclipse UML2 plugin, both installing via the update site and with a manual/dropin install, and could not get it to run with my Eclipse galileo installation. I note anyway that it does not yet support code generation, so that rules it out for me as I want to generate class stubs.
Another interesting review from diagramming.org may be found here.
After a long look around at commercial offerings as well, I found that it was all rather a minefield – some products were rough around the edges to say the least, but still trying to command a 4-5 figure sum for purchase!
In the end I found Enterprise Architect from Sparx Systems, and was immediately very impressed. Good reviews on the net, a variety of flavours at reasonable prices. It appears stable and has a very large feature set and extensive documentation. To generate and import Java code (which I want to do), the professional edition is needed as a minimum. This works out at $199 at the time of posting, which translates roughly to £133 – very impressive for a very reasonable price. Support is prompt (they fixed a broken trial version download promptly), forums seem helpful. I’m trialling it at the moment but it is likely that this is what I will go for.
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