Penguin-powered UML modeling With speculation building that Microsoft will bring Windows 7 forward by a year, ostensibly to staunch the loss of the Vista weary and Vistaphobes to alternative operating systems, now is a good time to look at the state of development tools for Linux. Software developers have got it surprisingly good - unlike, say, creative …
With regard to your closing remarks, I use Enterprise Architect (from Sparx Systems) under openSUSE 10.3, by running it in Crossover Office. Specifically, EA comes in a version designed to run in Crossover Office. EA perhaps isn't quite as snappy running this way as in Windows directly, but it's still pretty close, and it usually isn't worth booting up Windows just to run it under Windows.
Cheers, Tony.
Nice roundup. You are right about Sparx Systems' Enterprise Architect, it is by far the best UML tool I've ever used, although it could still be improved in a bunch of places. It's also dirt cheap compared to the other commercial offerings. Pity it's unlikely to appear in any non-Windows flavour any time soon.
However, XMI as an import / export option is totally borked on all the tools I've ever tried. Seems like the standard has been defined somewhere, but none of the vendors can agree on how it should work. Try moving a model between any 2 of the XMI-supporting tools and you'll most likely end up with garbage.
What it means for the user is that you must choose your UML tool very carefully, because if you build anything significant you'll be stuck with it for a *long* time.
It is a major pain in the ass.
You can't copy between two .zargo - Files and you can't export and import it. And that is the biggest problem with this tool, because in our company many people are working with UML, we have some standard diagrams, everyone needs to use and so on...
Printing is very frustrating, because of sometimes not printing everything or changes by ArgoUML itself in the printing-options, which render your print useless (Why on Earth should I want a 830mm margin on my A1 printout?)
In reality, if you really want to use your UML drawing for model-driven Delevopment you will need proper tools: MagicDraw, Rose, et al.
The existing OpenSource Utilities aren't mature enought yet.
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