StarUML

Last night I conducted a little research into free/opensource UML diagramming tools for Windows.  I’ve done this search a few times during the past several years and have tried a variety of the top-dogs.  The best one I can recall was ArgoUML but it’s UI behaved so annoyingly unpredictable that I ended up ditching it after just a short amount of time.  A runner-up was Dia, but it was a more general purpose diagramming tool that, again, had a pretty clumsy interface.

I didn’t expect to run across anything new in this search.  I actually came close to just buying Visio – it’s general purpose, obviously, but its interface is far from clumsy.  Then I ran across StarUML.  From the 30,000ft view, it appears to be a good tool.  It’s definitely worth putting into use and seeing how it handles under real usage scenarios.  Has anyone reading this ever used it?

It’s a responsive win32 app, which pleases me because I’m sick of the crappy Java UML tool UIs I keep finding.   

So I think I’ll give this one a shot for future development.  I’ll report back my findings.