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Free, non-sucky UML software?

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phitsc:
I used ArgoUML as well a few years ago but changed to the then free JUDE because it made much nicer print outs and exported images :) Meanwhile JUDE has experienced massive development and the product was commercialised (for good reasons I would say) but the company still provides a free community edition which is also still being developed.

Oh, just saw that they released a new version a week ago. Gotta go and get it....

ajp:
Being a Pythonista and doing the ArchGenXML stuff (generating Plone content types using UML), ArgoUML seems to be the best choice, not because it is that friendly or that cool, but because it gets the job done just right.

ArchGenXML includes an ArgoUML-specific template with all the tagged values available to Plone's archetypes, so there, ArgoUML is the de-facto standard in the Plone world.

But for other uses, printout quality and else, I can't tell.

jsfaint:
Maybe you can try this one, Jude, The community edtion is free.
Programmed in java.
The Homepage is:
http://jude.change-vision.com/jude-web/index.html

f0dder:
*bump*!
Why is it that all the free UML software sucks?

Today I gave both ArgoUML and JUDE (now Astah) a try... both look semi-decent, but have absolutely horrible keyboard support. ArgoUML doesn't seem to have any (documented, anyway) methods of adding operations/fields, whereas Astah does but often ends up with focus in the menu bar.

Are all the normal UML users mouse goons? How on earth do you have any kind of productivity if you constantly have to switch between mouse and keyboard to accomplish anything?

I looked at the WikiPedia List of UML tools, but wasn't really encouraged to try anything else - the other (free) choices seemed to be either outdated, sucky, or both.

So far the lesser evil is Visual Paradigm. It's bloated and has bugs, but at least it's managable and has (compared to the other offerings >_<) half-decent keyboard support. It produces terribly bloated output files, but at least it's zipped XML which should stand some chance of being interpretable by other software, whereas Astah for instance produces a zipped binary memory dump of Java Serializable objects.

mwb1100:
FWIW I've had trouble getting into the right mindset for any UML tool that I've tried - free or not. They each seem to have their own idea of how things should work, and pretty much none of them are intuitive (to me anyway).  To be fair, I have the same problem with any drawing program, so it's probably something wired up wrong in my head (I actually find using MS Word's drawing capabilities to be about the easiest for me to use for simple diagrams - for anything complex I try to get someone else to do it).

Whether by hand or using software, I'm in awe of anyone who can produce nice drawings - I have trouble with stick figures (I had to steal my avatar from some website).

The UML tool I've found least objectionable is Enterprise Architect (http://www.sparxsystems.com.au) - not free, but far less money than most other non-free options, though it seems to cost more now than when I bought it several years ago.  I haven't tried Visual Paradigm in a while, but back when I gave it a spin it didn't convince me to switch. That might not have been because of any problems but rather because it wasn't enough of a step up from EA to warrant paying for something else - I honestly can't recall.

I don't know what EA's native data format is, but it claims to support XMI which is a standard for describing UML diagrams in XML.  But I wouldn't be surprised if getting the XMI into (or from) some other program in a reasonable fashion requires a lot of teeth pulling and cursing (just speculation - I've never tried).

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