The story for today is about software that help you design UML diagram. How to choose UML tool is base upon the following choice..
-If you use the tool for draw UML Diagram I suggest the follow software
1. MS Visio
2. Poseidon
3. ArgoUML
4. MagicDraw
5. VisualUML
The above-mention software is not for free but however some software have community edition so you can use it for free.
– If you want to use UML tool for developing the complete software project I suggest you try Rational Rose Enterprise,Borland JBuilder Enterprise,Rational XDE or the other specific software that can generate the source code from UML Model such as iLogix,CodaGen,iUML etc.
– If you want to use OpenSource UML Tools, please try…
1.ArgoUML
2.JUDE
3.GIME (on Linux)
4.Dzine
Or visit this link
Now I will introduce popular UML tools, they are MagicDraw and Visual Paradigm.
Visual Paradigm for UML
Features:
- This software was design for varied customers such as Software Engineer, System Analysis,Business Analysis and System Architects.
- Support the latest standards of Java and UML notations.
- Can create the report Documentation in PDF or HTML format.
- It also can export the diagram to different image format (JPG,PNG,SVG etc.)
- Support sequence diagram creation from “Flow of Event” and Collaboration creation from “sequence diagram”.
- GUI (graphical user interface) of this software is easy to understand.
- Support all type of UML Diagrams.
- Visual Paradigm has a features of round-trip engineering for JAVA (Can do code generation from diagram and reverse the source code into diagram).
For more information about Visual paradigm please visit here
MagicDraw
Features:
- Support XMI for UML 2.0
- Support various kind of diagram such as Composite structure diagram , Use Case diagram , Sequence
diagram , Activity diagram , State diagram , Communication diagram ,Implementation diagram and including Component and Deployment diagrams
- Have a step by step guide, (I think this feature make it easy to use).It also has a help api that explain the command thoroughly.
- Can do the reverse engineering (Reverse from the source code back to the Sequence Diagram).This software support round-trip engineering (same as Visual Paradigm).
- It can export project file to many type of file such as GIF, JPG, PNG, PS, EPS, SVG
- Support code in many languages such as JAVA (JAVA 5.0) , C++ (& ANSI C) , C# , .net , COBRA IDL
- It has a security system and also integrate version control (CVS) into its Development Environment
Disadvantage of MagicDraw
– Use high amount of system resource (RAM, Harddisk)
– Hard to use for the person who new to UML design because its has many tools that have many details.
It is not suitable for design a small job. If you want to design a small job I suggest you use MS VISIO instead.
– It is not a Freeware, you must pay for the Full Version.For view the price please look for it here.
Thank you
Jitkasem