Eclipse UML2 Tools is Good

oodThis week I'm reading the book UML for the IT Business Analyst, and following its instructions to do requirement analysis.

I had used Enterprise Architecture long time ago, and I like it very much. Unfortunately, it is a commercial product, and expensive. Since I'm working on this open source project, I want every tool used is open sourced. I tried ArgoUML  sometime ago, a very famous open source UML tool, but was not satisfied.

I know Eclipse has a UML2 project under Modeling Project and a graphic tool project to draw UML2 models. I checked again and found out UML2 Tools already released 0.9 this summer. So I followed this tutorial to install and use the tool. I'm very impressed by this Eclipse UML2 Tools, and think it is good enough for UML modeling.

The graphic is pretty neat, and consistent with the whole Eclipse style. For example the use case diagram:

I appreciate the feature that you can save the diagram as SVG file, so I can post very big diagram to internet as SVG files, because all browsers now support SVG. So if you click the picture, you can view the more clear diagram in browser.

Here is the activity diagram for Manage Meeting business use case.

The Partition is very cool. The only issue is I can only layout partition horizontal, which is not the same as examples I see. And it is not convenient to view in browser or printed document.

The class diagram is also beautiful:

It is amazing that such a good tool is free and open sourced. Many thanks to Eclipse Modeling Team!