OO tools

Revision as of 11:53, 13 October 2009

This page describes the software engineer's arsenal. It is not intended to go into detail as to what these encompass; however, it will allow suitable tools to be proposed.

UML

A potentially appropriate use case diagram.

Round Trip Systems

• Together - Part of Borland's Eclipse implementation. Not well maintained, but still one of the best available round trip UML systems.
• GreenUML - An eclipse plug in. A passable system for class diagrams, does not scale well. Produces some unexpected behaviour. Additionally SeriouslyGreen a GreenUML extension with automated SVG export and themes. Produced last year as a software project at UC.
• Netbeans UML - This is a nice plugin for Netbeans that allows you to do reverse engineering (i.e. go from Java code to UML) and I think can also be used for round trip. The layout it generates isn't too nicely laid out by default but can be changed quite easily.

Static Systems

• Umbrello - A decent static system. Can generate most standard UML diagrams. Can import java classes one folder (i.e. package) at a time. Good at printing/exporting large diagrams. Linux ap, currently being ported to Windows & Mac.
• Magic Draw - Comprehensive free UML tool written in Java. Community Edition can be found here (registration needed). Version 16.5 seems to be quite buggy and is very slow.
• ArgoUML - Free open source Java application. Runs much faster than Magic Draw.
• UMLet - Simple design with minimal features but easy and quick to use.
• BOUML - Open Source and cross platform. Can reverse engineer C++, Java and Php code.

Editors

IDEs

• Eclipse
  • Eclipse UML2 Plugin UML Plugin with both Visual and XML style editing, and code generation
• NetBeans
• Visual Studio
• Geany

Text Editors

• Notepad++
• Programmer's Notepad
• vim
• emacs

Further Visualisation/Comprehension Tools

See Also

• Robert Cecil Martin 2003
• Martin Fowler 2003b