I evaluated Together about four years ago and was REALLY impressed with it's useability.
Yeah. it looks and feels great. Best usability in town, IMO.
Well, we're using Together Designer 2005 on a project where we're also using the AndroMDA Hibernate / Spring cartridges. The following things are important conerning Together Designer (TD):Not sure why he didn't evaulate those, I think (not positive) that Peter Friese (one of the developers) uses Together at work, maybe he could tell you more about how he thinks together works with AndroMDA (since he also uses Magic Draw for AndroMDA development he might be able to tell you how the two compare). I'm pretty sure he had to write some XSLT to fix the XMI for Together however.
Peter, you were/are using Togther with AndroMDA right?
a) looks and feels great
b) produces horrible XMI. I don't know what why - they even use the Netbeans MDR to perform the ouput of XMI, but in the end it is quite unusable. I had to write my own XMI export filter which was quite some work. At this time, my own export filter only supports class diagrams but can be extended to support all other diagrams as well.
c) There is no way to import the AndroMDA profiles. I had to write my own profile modules for TD. This was quite easy, since it just means to write some XML files (they use a plug-in concept similar to Eclipse). Now I have additional icons on the toolbar for entities, services and the relations between those elements. I also have color-codiing for the diagrams (entities get painted in green, servces in blue, etc.) This is VERY nice :-)
d) There is no way to seperate your models. At least at the time of this writing. I am going to talk to some Borland guys today to see how we can solve this problem and will let you know about the result later.
e) Some advanced stuff that is needed for AndroMDA cannot be modelled with TD. For example, it is impossible to put a stereotype on the parameter of a method, something which is used in the Spring cartridge. This was one reason why I asked Chad to extend the Spring cartridge in a TD compatible way ;-)
f) A VERY positive point about TD is that it writes all model elements to a separate file which makes versioning quite easy - you can even use it in a team of more than two people :-)
In terms of feature completeness, I'd recommend using MagicDraw. It has the best support for AndroMDA, since all the AndroMDA commiters are using it. The diagrams look really ugly IMHO, but that's not so important after all. An additional benefit: they use XMI as their native format, so you do not have to export the model to XMI.
If you are interested in taking a look at the XMI exporter, just drop me a note.
Peter
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