UML Modeling

[zparticle]

Has anyone here had experience with the Visual-Paradigm tool. Warning the site is extremly slow.

[blahblahblahh]

No, but I'm trying it out now.

100Mb download! Plus 30Mb for the docs! Sheesh...no wonder the site is slow (nb: I'm only getting 23k/s download too )

[zparticle]

I can't get the stupid thing to generate the getters/setters for the attributes.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Captain-Goatse]

UML Modeling  is a side product of flawed oop and absolute non-sense.

My last employer asked their new "fresh out of college" designer to draw trendy uml models before the code. Four days later, the person turned in 14 pages of shitty diagrams and a heap of insane spagethi code.

My results have been similiar. Of course I had to spend few hours to turn the code in to properly oriented funtional/procedual segments that actually fit the rest of the codebase.

UML Modelling is more like Astrology.

[zparticle]

Thanks for your opinion. Now for those of us that have a use for this, does anyone have a suggestion on tools for Java class diagraming.

Specifically I would like a simple tool not some massive thing like Rational and hopefully under $100 US.

[Bombadil]

I like Paradigm. I don't use any UML tool to draw so detailed diagrams that you even see set/get methods. :-)  I just use them to draw/maintain the "rough" diagram.

Poseidon, which is similar to Paradigm (they're basing on the same? Argo or what?) is also nice. Looks like it has some power behind, because for commercial usage it's not free. There's a personal edition however.

[zparticle]

I've tried several of these today and so far Poseidon is looking the most promissing. Thanks Bombadil.

[blahblahblahh]

I had major problems getting poseidon to work at all, and got fed up with the amount of hassle it was becoming, so I'm hoping paradigm will turn out to be a good alternative (it certainly has a very impressive feature set)

[rreyelts]

Thanks for your opinion. Now for those of us that have a use for this, does anyone have a suggestion on tools for Java class diagraming.

Specifically I would like a simple tool not some massive thing like Rational and hopefully under $100 US.

We've seemed to have good luck with MagicDraw here. IIRC they have a professional version or something for about $100. It's what we use. The big thing missing from that version is reverse engineering - but I don't think you'll see that in most sub $100 products.

God bless,
-Toby Reyelts

[thaaks]

Thanks for your opinion. Now for those of us that have a use for this, does anyone have a suggestion on tools for Java class diagraming.

Specifically I would like a simple tool not some massive thing like Rational and hopefully under $100 US.

At work we use UMLStudio (www.pragsoft.com) which runs under Windows only, costs 500$ but offers code generation (Java, C++, Ada, Forte), reverse engineering and round-trip engineering. It's pretty small, has a freeware version (limited in number of classes) and is very fast! Code and document generation (html, rtf) is scripted in some Lisp-like style and can easily be modified to satisfy your personal needs.

Other modeling tools to look at could be:
Metamill (www.metamill.com), which runs under Windows and Linux, offers code generation for Java, C, C++ and C# and is very affordable (125$). The last version I looked at (3.0) had some problems with models containing classes of different packages. I don't know if that's been fixed in the mean time.

Also Enterprise Architect (www.sparxsystems.com.au) seems to be quite good for the price. But you need at least the professional version for 149$.

I find Gentleware's Poseidon too slow and too big - just didn't like it the last time I tried. But that's just my personal opinion. To get a useful version of Poseidon you need at least the standard edition for 199 Euro. But currently they are state of the art with UML 2.0 support (what wonder, their boss is member of the standardization team of UML 2.0...).

For noncommercial stuff I could finally recommend Omondo, the Eclipse plugin. (www.omondo.com). It nicely integrates into Eclipse and is pretty good and free for noncommercial use.

Hope that helps,
Tommy

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[starscream]

BTW: did you see this?

http://www.falkhausen.de

This is what i call Documentation!

[swpalmer]

Doxygen will do similar stuff and it's free

[Jeff]

With the right tool I find UML a useful way to visualize code organization when architecting brand new systems of sufficient complexity.

Having said that, I have only found ONE tool that makes it work in practice and its expensive. Together, now owned by Borland.  What makes it work is that it is NOT a "round trip engineering" tool but a SIMULTANEOUS engineering tool.  As I work in the UML window it writes and re-writes the code in the code window.  At any time I can jump to the code window, make changes, and it immedately updates the UML diagram.

So in conclusion i find a useful view  on the data that is my code but only if it is usable at the same time as the traditional view.

[Bombadil]

Doxygen will do similar stuff and it's free

Doxygen does do to some extend what Javadoc does. No class diagrams however, and this is what a short look at the Falkhausen URL shows me... So different purposes.

[swpalmer]

Doxygen does do to some extend what Javadoc does. No class diagrams however, and this is what a short look at the Falkhausen URL shows me... So different purposes.

It does do class diagrams.. that's exactly what I was referring to.

[Bombadil]

It does do class diagrams.. that's exactly what I was referring to.

Doxygen just does do "inheritance diagrams", no class diagrams directly...
With additional graph drawing software tools it can be told to let produce class diagrams...

Now I see what you mean. I meant inheritance diagrams.

[zparticle]

Thanks everyone for your input.