UMLGraph

DEV'S PERSPECTIVE

• UMLGraph it's a open source project, and its code is in github.

• There's a third party Eclipse plugin named LightUML that uses UMLGraph to integrate the tool in it.

• It generates the diagram through Graphviz (the user needs to install it first), with a program executed with a console command, compiling the code of the file indicated in that command.

• It doesn't have compatibility with XMI files, neither to open them nor to generate them.

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USER'S PERSPECTIVE

• This tool is pretty difficult to install. You have to move some files manually to directories of program of your OS.

• Its syntax is based heavily on the way Java defines classes. The graphic elements that can't be infered from the java syntax (most of the relationships, elements other than pure classes...), has to be explicited with some javadoc tags.

• It may be necessary to add the tools.jar of javadoc to the classpath (if java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError is shown in console when the program is executed, is probably because of this) . To do that, is convenient to follow the next steps:

  • Search for the tools.jar with the command find . | grep "tools.jar".
  • Add the classpath with export CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:path/to/tools.jar

• With this tools is possible to generate class diagrams, sequence diagrams and component diagrams.

• There's multiple parameters the user can execute with umlgraph. One of them is -all, that makes the classes to have all their characteristics. Otherwise, they will show no methods or attributes.

• The user can indicate the relative position of the elements, but it's not necessary: The program make an automatic arrangement.

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