Posts tagged with "tools"

It's been more than a year since I started to move my old WordPress blog to Hugo. Work stopped around August 2024, and I've just this week come back to it. However, I was getting frustrated by having to reclimb the steep learning curve the for Hugo and yesterday I discovered Dave Pearson's blogmore tool (https://blogmore.davep.dev) which seems much more straightforward. Blogmore is a tool, written in Python, that creates a static website, but without many of the complexities of Hugo and similar static website tools. It's designed to be simple and encourage blogging more.

I hope to relaunch Fresh and Crispy at blog.cpjobling.net and use blogmore to blog more!

Martin Fowler mentioned UMLet in his recent article on UmlSketchingTools which I blogged about earlier this week. A paper in which the authors (Auer et al, 2003) describe the ideas behind UMLet is very insightful and pretty much echoes my own experiences of over-blown UML tools in the teaching domain (and I’ve tried ArgoUML, Poseidon CE, Together and Rational Rose with variable — but mostly limited — success over the last three or four years).

I have to say that, although it currently only supports class, object and use-case diagrams, UMLet looks very promising and may well prove to be a winner in next year’s Software Engineering courses. Better yet, UMLet can be used as an Eclipse plugin!

Reference¶

M. Auer, T. Schurtschenthaler, and S. Biffl (Vienna University of Technology), 2003. A Flyweight UML Modeling Tool for Software Development in Heterogeneous Environments”, 29th Euromicro Conference (EUROMICRO’03), Sept. 01–06. Balek-Antayla, Turkey. Conference Proceedings Published by IEEE.

Another approach to UML diagramming. This time publicised in Martin Fowler’s Blicki: MF Bliki: UmlSketchingTools. UMLGraph uses a mixture of JavaDoc tags and pic macros to do the hard work. Dr Spinelis argues for his declarative approach in “On the Declarative Specification of Models, IEEE Software, 20(2):94-96, March/April 2003 which is on-line in PDF format at http://www.spinellis.gr/pubs/jrnl/2003-IEEESW-umlgraph/html/article.html. Worth a look I think — as is the author’s (Domidis Spinellis) book Code Reading.

Jeremy Rayner’s June 15 blog entry directed me to another free drawing tool for UML diagrams. Thanks for the link!

I mentioned violet a couple of days ago. It is really simple, unfortunately it doesn’t have the ability to move classes around once positioned. This makes it a a bit hard to use. It is open source so that could be fixed of course!

Visual Thought is a drawing tool so it has the same advantages as Visio in that it’s not designed for MDA or for code generation, so you can happily use it for agile modelling. As I have some modeling to do over the summer as I rewrite my Client-Server Programming in Java Module, I’ll let you know how it goes!

Found this simple UML tool Violet on Cay Horstmann’s web site. Thanks to Frank Carver for starting a thread on tools for Java teaching on JavaRanch and
Marlene Miller for suggesting Violet.

I’m currently reading the free beta chapter of Version Control with Subversion from the forthcoming O’Reilly open book. Given that subversion can apparently use simple web technology, it may have more potential for use in a teaching situation than CVS — provided that the plugins for ant and eclipse are as good as the CVS ones! Watch this log for experiences on CVS versus Subversion.