Recently, I was designing a several J2EE servlets and needed express my thoughts in a scenario diagram. The diagram would be distributed and used by the rest of the development team. Unfortunately, I don’t have an industrial standard Unified Modeling Language (UML) software design tool such as Rational Rose, TogetherJ, or Microsoft Visio installed on my new laptop. And so, I searched for an open source solution on SourceForge.
After downloading and trying two other applications, I discovered UMLet. The design tool is described as follows:
UMLet is an open-source UML editor with a light-weight, pop-up-free user interface: draw UML diagrams fast, export diagrams to eps, pdf, jpg, svg, and clipboard, share diagrams using Eclipse, and create custom UML elements.
I downloaded and installed the UMLet Plug-in package for Eclipse. UMLet is a very simple tool that makes it easy to quickly sketch UML diagrams without worrying about all the details. Full featured UML design tools, such as Rational Rose, provided interactive development which requires components details to be designed in a set order (use cases, objects, and sequence diagrams). When I’m in design mode, I find that too much detail distracts me. I use a design tools primarily to structure my ideas and secondarily to illustrate them to others.
UMLet is really a set of UML component diagram drawing templates. The diagram templates are organized into categorized pallets. You select a pallet and a selection of UML diagram components are displayed in a separate window. To use the component, just double-click the diagram or an individual component; it appears in the drawing area. Here is UMLet nicest feature: underneath the template is the actual UMLet diagram code used to create the UML component. A change to the code modifies the diagram accordingly.
For my scenario diagram, I selected the sequence2_palette. I selected the entire template and modified the source code to produce my scenario diagram. When I completed the scenario diagram, I exported the diagram as a pdf document. The entire UMLet exercise (installation, learning curve, producing the diagram) took about eleven minutes to complete!
Of course UMLet isn’t perfect. If you are looking to generate code or reverse engineer an application look elsewhere. Moreover, there are no hooks between diagrams; modifications to one component are not propagated through the rest of the diagrams. There is no shading or color coding individual components. The user interface is primitive; the set of export formats is limited, etc. But it gets the job done when it comes to sketching UML designs quickly and most importantly it is light weight and does not impose restrictions, development methods or any particular design solutions.
UMLet can be run from the executable jar file or used as an Eclipse Plug-in. If you decide to use the Eclipse Plug-in, I discovered that you need to rename the plug-in directory to com.umlet.plugin_6.0.0 in order for Eclipse to load the plugin.xml file.
Comments
I would like to share one another good Uml Modeling tool with you. Check it out @ http://www.magicdraw.com
I install umlet and add jre(window-->prereferance-->java-->ınstalled jre-->edit-->add external jar-->umlet.zip) but ı can not use it in Eclipse.Can you help me?
What your describing is *not* how you install an eclipse plug-in.
The latest version of the UMLet plugin is in a file called "com.umlet.plugin_10.4.0.jar", which can be downloaded from here:
http://www.umlet.com/changes.htm
Note: click on the "UMLet 10.4 Eclipse plugin" link on that page.
You then need to manually copy that plugin file file to your eclipse installation's "dropins" folder. (If your using an older version eclipse, you won't have a "dropins" folder, in which case copy the file to your eclipse installation's "plugins" folder.)
More info is in the UMLet FAQ (http://www.umlet.com/faq.htm), look in the section called "How to start UMLet as Eclipse-Plugin?"
After spending several hours fighting with ARGO UML I tried UMLet. If you are doing designs that aren't linked to code UMLet is great. I was able to finish my use cases within 15 minutes of installing the tool. It's that easy to use.
Post new comment