Grouper Developers Forum

[Dave Donnelly <>]

I conducting an informal survey about which UML tools people
are using and some indication of suitability.

I am currently using Jude-Community from Change Vision
(http://jude.change-vision.com/jude-web/index.html). On a
scale of A to F, I would give it a C+. It's easy to use
but does not support round-trip engineering. Also the
print capability is rather limited. However, the free
version does most of the things I require.

Other tools I have used:

Rational Rose from IBM
link: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/awdtools/developer/rose/index.html
grade (A-F): A
comments: Excellent UML tool if you can afford it. The last time I used
it was about 5 years ago.

EclipseUML from Omondo
link: http://www.omondo.com/
grade: B- and falling
comments: Nice integration with Eclipse IDE (I use Eclipse).
Stopped using it because as new free versions were released, they
started removing more and more functionality. Also, EclipseUML
was _very_ sensitive to versions of other Eclipse plugins making
it difficult to upgrade either. The last time I used it was
about 2 years ago.

TogetherJ from Borland
link: http://www.borland.com/us/products/together/index.html
grade: (not enough experience with the product)
comments: I used this briefly about 4 years ago. It seems to be
on par with Rational Rose in functionality and price.

ArgoUml
link: http://argouml.tigris.org/
grade: (see comments)
comments: I could not get ArgoUML to run reliably on either of 2
computers. Not only did it crash, it required a power-down/reboot
to recover (and just to set the record straight, this occurred on
both Windows and Linux). Used it about 4 years ago.

Poseidon from Gentleware
link: http://www.gentleware.com/
grade: C+
comments: This is a commercial product based on ArgoUML but a free
version is available. Not as buggy as ArgoUML. Round-trip engineering
is supported using comment blocks. This can cause problems if you use
other development tools (e.g. Eclipse's Java comment generation tool).