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.
