A Different Take on UML: A Sneak Preview
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010 - By Vineet Sinha
We have been extremely frustrated with UML tooling in the past, and for the last 2+ years we have been building something very cool. See the video below:
Can’t see the video? Click here
Most UML Tools focus on creating diagrams before coding, but we believe in having diagrams made from code. Where other tools require months of work to get something useful, we want to get you useful results in minutes if not seconds. Some tools require reading lots of documentation to use, but we have wanted a tool that you can get up to speed in 5 minutes.
What do you think of it?
(interested? sign up and use on our homepage)
Can this be used with other languages or only Java?
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
We have designed it in mind to easily add other languages. Currently their is a prototype for C++ built, but we want to do a really good job for one group of people (Java currently).What language(s) would you like support for?
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
When you’re modifying stuff in the video, a dialog with a progress bar pops up for a split-second, but since the task finishes very quickly is disappears so quickly I feel it’s unnecessary. Maybe move the progess bar to the status bar to avoid this annoyance.
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
Hey Maro,Good point! We ourselves have been debating this. The dialog just popped up for a split second as it was a small resource to process. For now our reason to keep it there was that if the resource is large it takes a little longer to process and when the processing is happening nothing else can be done, so it makes sense to have a dialog there for that time period. Any suggestions about how it can be made better are welcome.
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
I’m a user of telelogic uml tools currently. 1. Do you have plans to support C, as distinct from C++. 2. Any plans for reverse engineering. 3. Can you import JAR’S.
We haven’t looked much into pure C projects. But it is definitely something that we would want to support.
With regards to reverse engineering: Are you referring to ‘source code’? I am not sure I follow you question. We only do reverse engineering.
Jars: Yes, we support them.
python
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
Yeah, Python support will be great.I will count you under the ‘votes for Python’ category. If you know others, feel free to send them our way.
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Perhaps a small progress bar embedded in the element you activated? For the first example in the video, double clicking ‘lapis’ would show a small progress bar embedded in the bottom of that element itself. That would indicate that it has reacted to the user action, which is what’s important. You could even do a safari-type thing and make the whole element into a progress bar.Clicking the item again while it’s still processing could bring up the dialog for more detail, or to let the user cancel the operation if it’s taking too long. If long running operations don’t actually happen, you could do away with the progress display altogether and just use a throbber. But they probably do happen.
If your engine can deal with it, this design also affords doing operations in parallel. If not, then you could queue up commands as they’re performed.
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
mullr, Thanks for the comment. We definitely want to investigate such ideas.So far we have been mostly focusing on the ‘big picture’ ideas, but will be working on improving such details as we get time.
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
When can we download something?
is it free?
We are letting people in slowly, to make sure that we can provide a good level of support. If you are interested, make sure to signup at the Architexa home page.
The software does have a free trial. Beyond that, we want to not only solve developers problems, but keep providing improvements based on needs of every developer – in aligning ourselves with that approach we will be charging a low amount but through the entire development to make sure we are useful for more than one part of the project (i.e. an annual subscription).
another vote for python.
Lionel, Thanks for the vote. We will get in touch with you as we start planning python details.
Ruby would be great as well, even though Eclipse’s ruby support is not the best among IDEs. Maybe this could encourage this situation to change it.Not sure if you already implemented it, but from the video it feels you click a lot when navigating through the uml graphs. Showing all nodes on the uml graph within a distance of 2 or 3 (depending on the ammount of nodes) would make it less clicky. Not to mention that a node on its own not really useful.
Grats on the very nice tool.
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
Ruby support may be implemented down the road depending on customer demand.Many UML tools add too much info automatically, we have a number of features that allow users to add the nodes they care about with a single context menu click: Show Super/Subtype Hierarchy, show Extending/Extended Classes, and show referencing types / methods.
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To elaborate what Seth said: We did try showing nodes automatically, but it often ended up with too much and users where forced to spend most of their time removing.We will investigate further different version of adding nodes automatically.
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
BTW, glad you like the tool.
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
[...] A Different Take on UML: A Sneak Preview Generating Diagrams from existing sources [...]
.Net (C# primarily)
This comment was originally posted on Hacker News
How about C# support?
Hi Raghu,
As Vineet said earlier we do intended to support other languages
but currently we are focusing on java. We would be more than happy to support C# depending on demand. Also feel free to let us know if you have something specific in mind and what you think of the tool.
Please continue discussion on the forum: link