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Real UML toolsReal UML toolsPosted Feb 18, 2012 18:58 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)In reply to: Real UML tools by angdraug Parent article: LibreOffice 3.5 released Thanks for the pointers. Dia feels a bit primitive indeed, after a cursory look. Sigh, I miss Together/J... 12 years later I have yet to see anything as flexible and useful as it was in its time. Why is it that UML has never given fruit in the shape of proper CASE tools, apart from some honorable (but transient) exceptions? In the meantime the tooling has improved greatly for coding and compiling even for exotic languages, but for design diagrams we are still in the stone age. I am sure it must mean something, but I am not sure what.
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Real UML tools Posted Feb 19, 2012 10:53 UTC (Sun) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link] I think the problem is twofold. On one hand, a quality CASE tool is hard to do, it takes a lot of effort and a lot of usability research, and software engineering as a field isn't as easy to study from the PoV of usability as e.g. web browsing or making presentations. On the other hand, workflows in the free software development are very different from the primary target audience of CASE tools: massive enterprise software projects. Different enough that simply ripping off an existing tool such as Enterprise Architect wouldn't help much to scratch an itch of a would-be free CASE tool developer. For one, tools like EA put a lot of restrictions on how you work, especially on the collaboration side of things, and they simply don't work if only a small fraction of contributors are willing to follow such restrictions, and most others just want to do some programming. Even bigger problem is that in free software, you really don't want to discourage casual one-off contributions, and nothing says "we don't want your code" like an unwieldy process tied into a specific CASE tool.
Real UML tools Posted Feb 19, 2012 14:25 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Actually, I wasn't even referring specifically to Free software work. For my own software I normally use vim and Terminal, and they fit the job perfectly. But even in the enterprise world there are no good UML tools. (I have not used Enterprise Architect, do you think it qualifies?)However, the intersection of Free software and enterprise software has a rich set of tools, including Eclipse and its many plugins. Eclipse does a lot of hard things well, and is somewhat of a counterexample to your arguments. It is striking that no good diagramming plugin for Eclipse exists, at the very least.
Real UML tools Posted Feb 24, 2012 13:16 UTC (Fri) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link] If there's one word to describe Enterprise Architect, it's byzantian. It's the most complete UML CASE tool I've used so far, and the basic diagram editing is rather sensible, but around the corners it has some very rough edges. I'm not fond of its collaboration mode (sticks everything in an sql db with all-or-nothing locks on whole sections of project tree, makes roundrips to the db when you least expect it, and has no revision management to speak of), also it's Windows-only and won't run in Wine without some serious voodoo and CrossOver. I'm not sure I would agree with your assessment of Eclipse. I know I is many things to many people, but, being a vim+xterm person myself, I find it unwieldy and often at odds with my workflow. I'd rather have a CASE tool that's integrated with a distributed SCM like git, so that I could track the design right next to the code. Integrate it with anything beyond that, especially a monster such as Eclipse, and I won't touch it with a 10-feet pole.
Real UML tools Posted Feb 24, 2012 13:31 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Thanks for the review. As I said I prefer Xfce Terminal + vim, but Eclipse is fine e.g. for developing Android apps (and much better than the competition). I am not sure if I would still feel comfortable with it for anything more complex. To be honest I am in a "Back to basics" mood with respect to dev tools; I even prefer to do refactorings by hand. Probably a secondary effect of being test-infected!
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