adam bien's blog

Drawing UML diagrams in ...netbeans 5.5 📎

I'm writing the first chapter of my  (german) book Java EE 5 Architekturen. Java Patterns und Idiome and I needed some UML-Diagramms to explain layering etc..
I write the samples with netbeans 5.5, so I was curious how the Netbeans UML-modelling works. The installation is easy, you can use the update center for this purpose.
My first impression: the UML-support is great for drawing diagrams from scratch. They look great, the tooling is easy to use. The performance could be better - on my laptop (1.7 Ghz) it feels slow, but it is better then starting standalone IDE and UML-tools. So I will use the netbeans UML tooling, at least for my book. Reverse engineering works also well, but it is not so important in real world projects...(except you have generate the documentation afterwards :-)).