yUML is only for simple UML class diagrams

I sat down for a while and extended the Grails Create Domain UML Plugin that I wrote about a couple month ago in this post. This plugin helps to generate UML class diagrams with yUML from a Grails domain model. Unfortunately the diagrams don’t show aggregations or compositions and the associations don’t have a name. I fixed that, but the generated diagrams are not really useable, because yUML is only for very simple UML class diagrams as you can see in the following pictures.

Neat top down

Neat left right

Conclusion: yUML looks nice, but is only usable for very simple diagrams.

One thought on “yUML is only for simple UML class diagrams”

Indeed, and the parser behind it can only handle trivial method signatures.

You could experiment a bit with Violet UML, it has a simple XML file format. Only drawback is that it has no layout whatsoever (the positioning in the xml is absolute), so you’ll have to ‘guesstimate’ at what pixels to put the class symbols :o(

Good luck!

Yanic on 2010/12/28 at 21:33 said:

Indeed, and the parser behind it can only handle trivial method signatures.

You could experiment a bit with Violet UML, it has a simple XML file format. Only drawback is that it has no layout whatsoever (the positioning in the xml is absolute), so you’ll have to ‘guesstimate’ at what pixels to put the class symbols :o(

Good luck!