Sacrilige, sin and travesty

[sargasso]

OK. I'll fess up

For the last three days I have been using a-*GASP*-nother *GASP* product.  It's called bouml and it can be found here http://bouml.free.fr/index.html.

By golly, by gosh, gee willikers it's FAST. Not fast as in MIPS but fast as in knocking up a use case model in about a third of the time it takes me in EA (ok that means about 3 days instead of 9 to get to the first publishable version, ok)

That's the good news..
Now, the...

...It's nowhere near as functionally or informationally rich as EA, it's code generation features are cool but not anywhere near as ubiquitous as EA,  it's implementation of UML rules is (ahem) rather (ahem) on the (ahem) strict (ahem) side of Margaret Thatcher's benevolent smile (ahem).  But for the speed it takes to knock up a model for discussion its superb.

...and the final blindsided left hook was that the XMI it produces is standard only on the Easter Islands on the third Tuesday after Michaelmas.

But, jeezIwish, that EA could provide that level of .... wait for it ...... UI consistency.



bah!  It's way past beer o'clock here in Sydney.


bruce

[sl@sh]

Just out of curiosity, since you already spent some time with this tool: what is it that makes modelling so fast? Is it the UI consistency you were pointing out? Or something else?

If it's UI, well I'd wish for more consistency myself. I'm a relatively new user and I find myself correcting diagram design errors more than half of my time - for one because connections are often not drawn the way I expect (i. e. with the arrow heads at the object I *start* drawing my connection from, or the aggregation icon at the object I *end* my connection at - and sometimes it's just the other way round), or simply because it's so complicated to *delete* wrongly created connections.

Also I'm confused over many options provided for objects that shouldn't *have* these options in the first place. I more often than not find myself wondering if I did pick the wrong kind of UML object or diagram even, because I have no idea what values I should assign to these options...

I can perfectly understand that a tool that doesn't provide even half of what's legal can be much easier to use. But while I like EA's openness, I very strongly wished for it to be more restrictive whereever it makes sense to be so. I mean, how much sense does it make to provide a 5 tabs dialog for a connection that can legally have at most a handful of actual properties?

[Paolo F Cantoni]

...and the final blindsided left hook was that the XMI it produces is standard only on the Easter Islands on the third Tuesday after Michaelmas.

Monsieur broose,

Your XMI problem ees obvioos - eet ees standard on Muroroa Atoll and the other former external portions of metropolitan France in ze Souse Pacifeeq!

Paolo

[sargasso]

Your XMI problem ees obvioos - eet ees standard on Muroroa Atoll and the other former external portions of metropolitan France in ze Souse Pacifeeq!

wassa madda you
you godda no respeck



b