Hi Neelam,
Here's another perspective on Enterprise Architect that may help, when comparing against Rational and some comments on TogetherSoft as well.
Rational is a Big System
Rational's a Big Name. When you buy Rational products, totally independent of the quality of the products, you're paying for a brand. The argument goes: Rational's going to stick around, Rational will be there, look at all these success stories, there are thousands of Qualified Rational Consultants, you can be SAFE.
Aimed at the Corporate market where name and brand confidence is generally first and foremost, Rational Suite is what's really on the agenda. The Complete Solution. The package is: a tool for every purpose (oh wait, you want truly user-centred design, aha, well sorry buddy you have to wait until WE think its important enough), all wrapped up nicely with a big bow. I remember thinking, coming out of software engineering classes all those years ago that traceability was key, and if we had a system that could trace through changes from requirements to code, we'd be in Nirvana. However 95% of systems do NOT NEED complete automated traceability: the reality is that there will be people on the team who will, effectively, be able to track changes with project mgmnt tools and even little bits of paper at times, and -shock- even using their HEADS occasionally! Heavens above. Anyway. What I'm saying is that most project environments are not the rigorous type that a) can afford Rational and b) need it. Motivation for most Rational Companies is brand confidence these days. (I mean, that's not a trivial thing, but less important for smaller companies.)
The reality is that, when the rubber hits the road, Rational is quite a complicated system to work with. Its license management system is a friggin nightmare (hands up who have suddenly needed another license half-way through a project, but only for like 2 weeks and that's it because the project tasks were parallelized? aargh). And at IconMedialab where I worked last year the Policy was Rational, but the reality was it was WAAY too expensive even for us (a boutique ebusiness company). And its tools: Requisite Pro, ClearCase etc.. they're really complicated. They take ages to set up. You really do need Rational Consultants, because it's a big deal to work with the suite.
I was looking at Enterprise Architect at Icon (as Geoff may remember) but what suited us better at the time with the processes that were already in place for capturing use cases was Together from
www.togethersoft.com, which I bought for our team. Together's a very slick UML/Java tool with real-time sync of code and UML, with C++ and C# support as well. It does JSP really well now too. But it's Rational prices: about $US7k per seat, and it too now has license management servers which are ugly: you have to install a license server on every laptop that you want to take home... gimme a BREAK. And it eats memory and CPU for breakfast. If you want to work with just Together, you really need a minimum of 256MB/500MHz machine (not so bad these days) but if you want other java apps running, add another 500Mhz, another 256MHz... it eats CPU for breakfast. Yuuum yumm. Scrunch scrunch.
NOW. EA. A big deal is that EA does UML, just like Rational Rose, and Together. The core product does exactly the same thing: there's no proprietory model to work from and so there's a major distinguishing factor removed from Rational and EA.
Support for a small company works differently to a big company. If you're more comfortable with the bows and ribbons and flash Service Level Agreements and Assurances Of Quality Con$ultan$ Available To Help then that's fine, Rational is really for you and your company, honestly. But EA is from a small company, and their support is as good as one can possibly get from a small company:
- you have easy access to the people who write the software. If you find a major bug or issue that really annoys you, you can -expect- an update within a week or two: urgent patches I know have been done within 24 hrs if there's a showstopper. That's just how Sparx works. Try getting a bug fixed in Rational. Uh uhhh! No way. Wait until we want to release it, which will be at least 6 months away. And new features? Niggles? Forget it. Totally ignored. Sparx listens. That's what I've found. The probability of a new feature appearing in EA that you suggested is infinitely greater than in Rational. That's what's cool about using a Small Company Product.
- there's an active user community. People ask questions, and they're answered. You know what? This is what people generally resort to for almost all products: Rational, Microsoft, ATG, BEA, all of them. Except in the EA forums, as I mentioned above, EA is right in there.
Will Sparx be around? This depends I'd imagine on the continued support by the user base. Sparx has been around for quite a while alread. Like any small company starting, I'd imagine Geoff has invested an -awful-lot- of his own time for this project but there are other people responding to sparxsystems.com.au addresses so obviously things are getting better.
The future? It can only get better. With code gen, EA is a seriously attractive tool.
To Geoff and the gang: I would pay THREE TIMES the current enterprise price for real-time code/diagram sync like in Together. Integration with JUnit testing would be pretty nice -- you have the test infrastructure, JUnit is the java standard for unit testing now, makes sense to integrate. If you could just sliip JSP in there that'd be really lovely too
I don't know what Geoff's exit strategy is, if there is one. I guess there will be some point in the future where he might want to retire, but hell, maybe he already is! And maybe this is What He Really Wants To Do With His Life. I personally can't think of anything cooler than doing what he's doing.
All I could ask of Geoff now and in the future is that if he decides to bail, release the source so the legend of EA can live on.
Anyway, my €0.02
