Archive for the ‘Software Design’ Category
Tim O’Reilly, Cloud Computing Keynote
Filed under: Open Source, Software Design | Tags: cloud computing, open source software, OSS
Leave a comment This isn’t necessarily an Eclipse-specific post. I’m trying to expand my desktop/IDE-centric worldview a bit, and thought other tools developers might find this interesting.
Also, I enjoy listening to Tim O’Reilly. His talk encompasses Cloud Computing, Open Source Software, Open Data, and tools for using/sharing Open Data. As a tools developer, I found it thought-provoking.
Sequence Diagram Tool for Eclipse (part 2)
Many people sent me recommendations for an Eclipse-based UML Sequence Diagram tool. Thank you all.
I’m going to take a look at some of these in more detail to see if one of them solves the problem I identfied in the previous post. I will report back what I find.
So far, the best ‘quick and dirty’ tool for creating sequence diagrams is not Eclipse based. It’s web based.
It’s called WebSequenceDiagrams. Its input is a simple and clear language:
And it generates a usable sequence diagram. Perfect for explaining how some key interactions in the system work.
This is obviously a very simple example, but I’ve quickly ‘drawn’ diagrams with 12+ objects and 50+ sequences. Moving back and forth between the JDT/CDT, a text editor and a browser is a bit of a pain. But its still quicker than anything else I have tried before.
Recommendations for UML tool for Eclipse?
I’ve been searching the web this morning looking for an easy to use UML tool that I can use inside Eclipse.
There are quite a few on Eclipse Marketplace. Before I narrow down my list, I thought I would ask the community for recommendations.
The use case is that I am reading through a very large code base (millions of LOC) and need to document some key interactions with sequence diagrams.
- Sequence diagrams are top priority
- Class diagrams are second priority.
- I want to create a conceptual diagrams. For example, I want to quickly pick and choose which object interactions to show in the sequence diagram. Or which attributes and methods to show in the class diagrams.
- I definitely don’t want to have to populate a full UML2 model.
- It needs to be easy and quick to create a sequence diagram. I stopped using Visio years ago because it took forever to populate and lay everything out.
- It needs to output some format that I can post to a webpage such as png.
- It needs to be $0-$100.
What tools do you like and why?
Update: Thanks for the suggestions. I’m going to look into them and share what I find. I’ve written about the tool I decided to use here.
Eclipsed 