UML Tools

[Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>]

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to give you all a brief update about what I have learned 
about both GEFEG's UML product EDIFIX and a free UML Modeler that I 
may be using until/if we are allowed a reasonable legnth of time for 
an evaluation or not-for-profit license for IBM's revamped Rational 
toolset when it is released sometime in January.  That UML modeler is 
available from Visual Paradigm, under its "Community Edition" at

http://www.visual-paradigm.com

Visual Paradigm is a Hong Kong company, so the tutorials have some 
interesting translation constructions, but it makes for a nice 
International Package with the German GEFEG's EDIFIX product.

Just FYI, Gefeg's EDIFIX is not a modeler. What it does is take a UML 
model and output an XML Schema and documentation as well as basic 
code from the model which can then be used by our various member 
companies to test how our candidate specifications perform, or how 
our thesari or equivalence-mapped vocabularies perform. Likewise, VP 
for UML is a full featured UML modeler, and it also outputs or 
reverse engineers program code which can also be output to work with 
the major IDEs, with a separate modeule for Visual Studio .NET using 
Visual Paradigm Suite which includes Smart Development Envvronment 
for Eclipse, NetBeans, JBuilderIntelliJ IDEA and WebLogic Workshop. 
No, I don't own stock in this company. I am slogging through the 
tutorials along with the EDIFIX Manual..

As far as I can tell at this point, just about the only things that 
this set of programs lacks that Rational had is the ability to track 
project development, along with runtime simulation testing and 
monitoring, which was one of the key features of Rational that I was 
looking forward to using. However, who knows what will be available 
in the new Rational suite that is being developed under the code term 
Atlantic. Hopefully, IBM will release the newly reconfigured Rational 
Suite at about the time I will be ready to test it with their 
Websphere Application Server v6.0 which is now available. Since I 
work cross platform and maintain a vendor agnostic approach to 
Enterprise-wide IT Integration, I just happen to be very interested 
in these intersections. They also tend to make the standards we are 
investigating somewhat more universal in applicability.

Regardless, I just wanted to make sure you all know that we have 
relatively full-featured toolsets available on which to build and 
test our standards.

Ciao,
Rex
-- 
Rex Brooks
President, CEO
Starbourne Communications Design
GeoAddress: 1361-A Addison, Berkeley, CA, 94702 USA, Earth
W3Address: http://www.starbourne.com
Email: rexb@starbourne.com
Tel: 510-849-2309