I'm also a newcomer to UML, looking for a good modeling tool.
I downloaded the free community version of
Poseidon, which appears to be a well-designed, full-featured UML modeling tool (even has java code generation, if you can figure out how to use it). This tool is based on ArgoUML and written in java. It does a lot of stuff, but the documentation doesn't really cover all the ins and outs; and some details seem a little wrong. (For example, the horizontal arrows in my sequence diagrams don't always match up to the little vertical blocks extending down from the class elements like I think they should...).
The biggest problem with Poseidon is that it's slow as h**l on my (admittedly rather old and clunky) workstation, running on WinNT. When I select 3 class objects in a diagram, Poseidon freezes up for a couple minutes (running 97% of my cpu), but then eventually comes back to its right mind and forges ahead without actually crashing anything.
I came here looking for something that runs quicker, but maybe doesn't have all the fancy code-generation stuff. I just want to be able to model the UML; then I can type the code myself. 8-)
Bruce Eckels (the Thinking in Java guy) has a summary of survey results regarding everybody's favorite UML tools (with links) at
http://www.mindview.net/WebLog/log-0041. I've been thinking about trying
Jude next...
any other suggestions would be most gratefully appreciated!
thanks,
John Holme
