Once again the latest version of Altova's UModel has added some rich new features to its already packed UML tool for software modeling and application development. While still complex by its general nature, UML is a set of models that can be used to describe and design software. UModel was developed with the interest of making the UML process easier.
The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a graphical language for organizing, analyzing, and planning software projects before coding begins. The UML attempts to take lessons learned in other engineering disciplines and apply them to software development.
The UML specification is maintained by the Object Management Group (OMG) and was originally created in 1997 by combining of the strengths of three competing software modeling technologies. The current specification (UML 2.2) reflects revisions, suggestions, and enhancements resulting from years of applying UML in practice.
UModel is a graphical modeling designer that will allow you to visually design application models in UML and generate Java, C#, or Visual Basic.Net code, as well as project documentation. It will also allow you to reverse engineer existing programs into UML 2 diagrams, fine tune them, and then regenerate the updated code.
While the UML is a complete modeling language, but it does not discuss the methodology for the development, code generation, and round trip engineering process. This gives UModel the ability to allow you the maximum flexibility during these creative processes.
So what's new with UModel 2010?
• SysML Diagrams lets you create SysML diagrams for embedded systems modeling. This is a graphical modeling language that is related to UML and is optimized for designing software to control and operate embedded systems and other complex devices. An embedded system takes inputs and creates output and its internal operations can be opaque. This can make software to control embedded systems difficult to develop, test, and debug. The SysML diagrams can be divided into ones that capture the system requirements and physical constraints, ones that describe the structure of the system, and ones that describe the behavior of the system. UModel supports all the SysML Diagrams and extentions.
• Automated creation of multiple sequence diagrams from source code lets you draw UML sequence diagrams that describe the interactions between objects within your application and specify the messages that objects send and receive. This gives you the ability to map scenarios described by a use case in step-by-step detail to define how objects collaborate to achieve your applications goals.
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