New UMLKit Available For Netbeans 6.5 - First Tests - Reverse Engineering Of EJB 3 Rocks

UMLKit was introduced to the update manager silently. It is a new, updated and streamlined version of the already existing UML extension for netbeans. For installation go to menu: Tools --> Plugins ---> Available Plugins and type in "UML". First impressions:

  1. The installation package is smaller: about 7 MB
  2. The installation process was smooth - the UML capability was enabled on the fly, even without restarting Netbeans 6.5b
  3. Reverse engineering of an existing EJB 3.1 / WAR project was fast  and worked well. The whole procedure (parsing, creating a  new project and model) was completed in ...1 second.

Begin processing Reverse Engineering
Parsing 8 elements

Analyzing attributes & operations for 8 symbols

Resolving 6 attribute types

Integrating 8 elements

Building the query cache.

================================
Task Successful (total time: 1 seconds)

  1. The usability of the diagramming was improved. (context aware actions, snap-in functionality)
  2. The visualization of existing model works good. All dependencies, realizations and inheritance relations were recognized.
  3. The performance of the diagramming functionality seems to be better.
  4. Some of the UML diagrams are no more supported. The mainstream diagrams, like: activity-, state-, class- and  use case are still supported. I miss the deployment diagram - it was good to document e.g. cluster environments and the application servers in production environments.
  5. The look and feel of the diagrams was improved - it looks better.
I'm really happy, that UML-diagramming is back again. I used the old plugin for all my illustrations in recent articles and books - it saved me a lot of time. Now I need a solution for my current book :-). I actually do not know another tool with such good non-intrusive project / source integration. And ...it is free...

 

Comments:

Good to hear that NetBeans' UML support received some man hours/days/month again. I gave up on using it due to the performance, once and switched to Jude.

There is a free community edition of Jude which is fast and reliable and as of v5.0.2 supports Java 5 now.

Maybe you might want to give it a try: http://jude.change-vision.com/ (don't judge by the horrible web page...)

Marcus

Posted by Marcus Olk on September 03, 2008 at 12:39 PM CEST #

Marcus,

I used NB to document some principles and explain some ideas. For that purpose it was just perfect. I will try judge!

thanks!,

adam

Posted by Adam Bien on September 03, 2008 at 01:02 PM CEST #

last time I checked the showstopper was the absence of the undo function, unfortunately I'm not smart enough not to feel the need for it while drawing...

Posted by magomarcelo on September 08, 2008 at 08:55 PM CEST #

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