Once upon a time I used to be a fan of the TogetherJ UML design tool (in fact, I even co-authored a book on it that sold, oh, 12 copies), and even though it isn’t fashionable these days I still think there’s a lot of value in UML as a way of expressing designs.

Anyway, for some of the documentation of Apache Isis I was looking around equivalent UML tools that offer similar capabilities to TogetherJ, preferably open source/free.  The one that seems to be closest is Soyatec, which offers both a free and a paid-for edition as plugins to Eclipse 3.7 and earlier.

What I like about this tool is that – like TogetherJ – it seems to generate the class diagrams from the Java source code, offering live updates, and uses Javadoc attributes as hints for the rendering.  However, it didn’t take long to run into problems.

Read the rest of this entry →