> Sadly, Rational wants quite a bit of money for an educational license
> for Rational Rose. Last year, I believe they wanted $1600/seat, which
> is only discounted 20% from their list price.
>
> This is completely out of line, especially if we wanted to support
> 10 developers, especially when you compare it with the cost of a
> laptop, or Framemaker, which lists at $800, but we can get at
> $138/seat.
>
> I believe that Rational is missing out on the educational market.
> Most vendors have realized that students in universities today are the
> engineers of tomorrow that make purchasing requests. Certainly the
> CAD tool vendors have been very generous in making very expensive
> software available for student use. If Rational was $400/seat, I'd
> consider going for it.
I wouldn't. It is amazing how history repeats itself, a/the leading
structured analysis tool was StP (Software thru Pictures). It had
staggeringly
bad ergonomics. Now the leading OO tool has acquired the same
characteristics,
particularly surprising since its ancestor OMTtool was a pleasure to use.
It is also surprising how little commitment Rational have to support UML;
last I heard there were no plans to support concurrent states.
Rose is also not the end of the story. You won't get very far with using
the pictures without the Soda documentation product. Linked objects from
Rose to Word at any rate don't work (reliably).
> I believe TogetherJ will generate UML diagrams, and TogetherJ might
> be freely available for academic use - I'll have to check.
It's free-ware, subject to the GNU GPL. It sensibly synchronises diagrams
and code,
but consequently suffers from requiring accuracy. I find that good overview
diagrams contain simplifications and so need to be inaccurate.
> I would like to move our UML diagrams away from Visio and in to
> another product, but we have hundreds of hours invested in them, so
> the move is not something we should do lightly.
Visio is a drawing package that happens to do UML and so behaves distinctly
weirdly at times. The others are UML packages that happen to draw and so
tend
to be restrictive. Can anyone recommend a good tool for drawing and
maintaining
UML diagrams during the design phase? A Vergil configuration?
Regards
Ed Willink
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