adam bien's blog

New UMLKit Available For Netbeans 6.5 - First Tests - Reverse Engineering Of EJB 3 Rocks 📎

UMLKit was introduced to the update manager silently. It is a new, updated and streamlined version of the already existing UML extension for netbeans. For installation go to menu: Tools --> Plugins ---> Available Plugins and type in "UML". First impressions:

  1. The installation package is smaller: about 7 MB
  2. The installation process was smooth - the UML capability was enabled on the fly, even without restarting Netbeans 6.5b
  3. Reverse engineering of an existing EJB 3.1 / WAR project was fast  and worked well. The whole procedure (parsing, creating a  new project and model) was completed in ...1 second.

Begin processing Reverse Engineering
Parsing 8 elements

Analyzing attributes & operations for 8 symbols

Resolving 6 attribute types

Integrating 8 elements

Building the query cache.

================================
Task Successful (total time: 1 seconds)

  1. The usability of the diagramming was improved. (context aware actions, snap-in functionality)
  2. The visualization of existing model works good. All dependencies, realizations and inheritance relations were recognized.
  3. The performance of the diagramming functionality seems to be better.
  4. Some of the UML diagrams are no more supported. The mainstream diagrams, like: activity-, state-, class- and  use case are still supported. I miss the deployment diagram - it was good to document e.g. cluster environments and the application servers in production environments.
  5. The look and feel of the diagrams was improved - it looks better.
I'm really happy, that UML-diagramming is back again. I used the old plugin for all my illustrations in recent articles and books - it saved me a lot of time. Now I need a solution for my current book :-). I actually do not know another tool with such good non-intrusive project / source integration. And ...it is free...