Hackerdude

I've been playing with the idea of taking the UML straight out of java, so I can do multiplatform UML Sketching using basically plaintext .

So I went and downloaded UMLGraph and incorporated it into the my build system.

So far I like it, but I have a couple of thoughts on it.

• It would be nice if it allowed for translating accesors into attributes. For example, a piece of code such as:
  
public void setFirstName(String firstName);
public String getFirstName();


  Should be modeled as a single "firstName" attribute. This should be configurable per class. This is specially important if you use DAO a lot. I think it's important to know at a glance if there are extra "operations" other than basic field access.

• I haven't tried very hard yet, but from the docs it is not obvious how to create a sequence diagram. It mentions the syntax, but where do you put this text? In the comments of the file? In a new file? What's the extension it expects? Will it scan for it automatically or do I need to call the command line in a special way? Sequence diagrams feel a bit like an afterthought. Maybe I'll feel different once I get one to work.
• UMLGraph seems to create one (1) diagram per invocation. I had to write an ant task that called another ant task for each of the packages I wanted to generate a graph for. It would be nice if it tghere was an option for "one graph/page per package" or something like that. Calling it with all your source gives you a giant diagram that really stresses the Windows Picture Viewer. Apparently Maven's DotUML Plugin uses UMLGraph and supports this feature by setting the property maven.dotuml.singlepackage to false.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 23rd, 2005 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.