The results of a simple standards-based test of some popular UML tools.
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A communication gap exists in most organizations of any size. This even applies One of the most common ways of passing on knowledge is through diagrams. In our field, these diagrams often take the form of UML drawings.
None of the UML shapes are complex to create, but automating their creation and rearrangement saves time and also adds consistency. Most of us want something that draws what we want quickly and easily. All of the UML tools I review here can do this to slightly different degrees. However, only one tool is open source. The differences are instructive.
Reviewed here are the DIA drawing program, which is open source, Poseidon by Gentleware and No Magic's MagicDraw. The latter two products have binary-only Community Editions that are available for free for non-commercial purposes. All of them run under Linux and Windows.
The simple tests that I applied below are taken from Scott Ambler's excellent little book The Elements of UML Style.
DIA Version 0.92.2
DIA is a drawing package based on the GNOME Toolkit, gtk+, that tries to emulate the functionality of Microsoft's VISIO program. For simple-minded applications, such as putting predefined visual objects on a sheet, it works fine. However, shapes and pallets have little semantic knowledge about the shapes they contain.
The first figure example in Ambler's book demonstrates how crossing lines have a little bump in one set of lines to indicate that the lines are crossing and not merging. None of the packages showed this distinction this simply. For DIA, I ended up composing this type of line out of an arc and two line segments. It was doable, though, and I then was able to put this crossover connector shape into the UML palette.
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