Nirmalya’s Blog

Finally found a great free UML tool.

A few weeks ago I had written about finding a free alternative to Visio, but the alternative/s I tried had a few shortcomings.

I found DIA to be great for drawing use case diagrams, but not so good for drawing sequence diagrams.

Drawing sequence diagrams using a 30 day trial version of SmartDraw took me ages, mainly becuase when making changes, the messages’ text boxes got selected, much more often that I liked them to be. Moreover, exported PNG images had a huge watermark running across the lower right corner. Had to use MS Paint to get rid of them, sometimes pixel-by-pixel!. Thats wasting my time.

I wanted something that
- can draw the most commonly used UML diagrams
- has clean exported images (preferrably as PNG),
- easy to pick up,
- free, or at a reasonable cost

Here came JUDE (Java and UML Developers’ Environment).
- Can draw good use case diagrams AND neat sequence diagrams
- No watermarks (atleast not when images are export as PNG)
- No struggling with the diagram, when introducing changes
- Very short learning curve
- Super fast operation
- Written in Java

Other features include
- Support for UML 1.4
- Collaboration Diagram
- Statechart Diagram
- Activity Diagram
- Deployment Diagram
- Component Diagram
- Generate Java source code from model
- Import Java source files to create model

For screenshots, please refer to their website.

Related: Free Alternative To MS Visio

On A Sidenote:
“Hey Jude!” was one the best songs by the Beatles [Source].