EA vs Rose

[ktweedy]

Hi,

I have been using EA for several months now I have really liked it.  I am working at a company that has Rational Rose.  I showed my group EA and they really like it and said that we can get licenses for the team but I need to give them a list of benefits using EA over Rose.

I have used Rose some and what I had couldn't import my .NET Framework code.

Does anyone have experience with both that can commnet on the pros and cons of both for .NET Framework 1.1/2.0 Windows/Web development.

Thanks.

[JohnDoe]

EA costs 1/25 of Rose license fee.

Any more arguments ?

Regards
Bernd

[«Midnight»]

There is an old article that gives a comparison. It is somewhat dated, but I think it covers a lot of the ground. Since the time this comparison was authored both products have added features, but IMHO EA has gone quite a bit further than Rose.

You can find the article at: http://www.dthomas.co.uk/src/requestDoc.asp?DocumentID=107&Category=Consulting%20Articles

[Note that I use Firefox and cannot get this url to display properly. Using IE it works just fine. It is a PDF file, so you may be more successful downloading it from the home page of: http://www.dthomas.co.uk/ea.htm]

HTH, David

[Paolo F Cantoni]

EA costs 1/25 of Rose license fee.

Any more arguments ?

Regards
Bernd

Bernd,

How cheap do you want the wrong answer?

There's no such thing as a free lunch - it's the total cost of ownership that counts.

Luckily, EA is a highly functional product that has a very competitive price - but it might not suit everybody...

For example, notwithstanding that EA is also about 1/20 the price of Embarcadero ER/Studio, there are lots of things ER/Studio can do that EA can't and if you really need those things, the price differential is not that great.  ER/Studio would most likely be more cost effective than EA.

Again, luckily, EA is improving at a much faster rate than ER/Studio so...

My AU$0.05
Paolo

[sargasso]

   I'll see your 5 and raise Berndt's  $1.00

"a tool for the whole team"  aka all plumbers need a chisel and all carpenters need a pipe bender, ergo we need a pipe bender with a sharp end on it.

Not all of the team need the same tool.  However all of the team need a way and a means to share and resolve design issues regarding the whole solution.

I would not expect a code lathe IDE to generate highly sophisticated DDL management scripts or query optimisation,  nor would I expect an expensive RDBMS management system to provide a means of generating highly tuned and efficient real time code.

However, of late there seems to be an increase in the expectation that a tool that is and should be a superb system modelling tool should also be an IDE and a RDBMS optimiser and a WokBook documenter and a .....

I maintain (yet again) that EA should concentrate on its strengths as a modelling tool and hopefully cotinue to increase that strength through improvements that are focussed on syntactically and semantically consistentent models.

Bangs, pops, bells and whistles aside there lies the TCO value of EA over any other tool I have experience with.  No other offering is as up to date, flexible or rapid as EA - on a licencing, support or functional basis.

(JM$Au1.05)

bruce

[Dave_Bullet]

Let's start with requirements.... (not a bad idea in most cases).

Seems like you want to have diagrams drawn of your .NET code?  Why I'm not sure but EA should do that for you.  In addition, EA can via a debug create a sequence diagram showing you the dynamic behaviour of your code (not sure whether Rose will do that).

Of course, Vis studio can create diagrams and EA 6.5 now supports TFS as a version control store.

I suppose what I'm saying is you need to define clearly what your pain points are, then evaluate tools that specialise in dealing with those pain points.

EA does many generic things well, but I'd argue it doesn't specialise in any of them extremely well.  The beauty with EA - is everything "integrates" nicely and we find it delivers functions to the 80/20 rule across most of our IT roles.

My 1c

Cheers,
David.

[thomaskilian]

Just another 0.05€: You have a very lifely discussion forum which gives you a LOT of help in very short time. Also Sparx is really reacting on users requests. Not only from their support page and also and espcially by looking into and interacting in this forum. I don't know any other software company/product with that attitude

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Just another 0.05€: You have a very lively discussion forum which gives you a LOT of help in very short time. Also Sparx is really reacting on users requests. Not only from their support page and also and especially by looking into and interacting in this forum. I don't know any other software company/product with that attitude

Echoing Thomas' point, there are about 5 reasons I chose EA as my tool of choice and this forum was up there with the best of them... It is a credit to Sparx that they pretty much allow the forum to discuss things unencombered...

Paolo

[JohnDoe]

>>> There's no such thing as a free lunch -
>>> it's the total cost of ownership that counts.

Agreed.

IMHO in many UML design groups, the modeling tools are not used very seriously or exhaustively, but often enough as a simple drawing tool for the program architect group. Code generation is something that only a few will do at the end of design phases, while some of the guys will use the tools merely to draw UC's, sequences and gather requirements. And therefore 1/25 of the price is excellent.

You can easily buy 20 licenses for the whole team and a few additional licenses of the target platform specific generator tools importing XMI from EA for the guys who will generate or reengineer.

For example, at my current project there is a lot of ABAP coding. SAP comes with its own IDE. But IMHO object oriented modelling ist something that is better done outside those coding focused IDE's. We design with EA, but code inside SAP itself. But dividing design and coding into two phases is an excellent approach to get people think before they code anyway. Other projects here (e.g. Oracle based servers) are also using EA for the design, because of its database designing capabilities (though Oracle offers own design tools, but as most of you know, they cost extra and so the paying story goes on and on ...).  And I know the java guys here debug their sources visually using EA.

So IMHO EA is an excellent tool for project independant general usage and as a wonderful tool for huge project teams (people without modeling ambitions can also use the free viewer to dig into the UseCases; and don't forget about the excellent printout options).

If you want to convince your company to switch to UML and OO, you need a tool that they can afford for a majority of programers. If companies have to buy dozends or hundreds of licenses, they tend to take those tools already available on the desktop clients for free (it is a terrible job to explain managers that buying 100 modeler licenses 5.000 bucks each does pay off some day; therefore exaplaining 98 modeler 200 bucks each and 2 platform dependent generator tools is somewhat easier) - paying 200 bucks for a fancy modeler and source generator isn't that complicate to explain.

Just a few thoughts ...

Regards
Bernd