Here at work they payed quite a bit of money for Together J. This is an uml environment based on eclipse. They want it to reverse engineer some of my implementations. I already made a sequence diagram using Dia before the project started, this took me about half an our. Now that the code is finished you would expect that this would go much faster as Together J has a reverse enginering feature. Let me say that for removing,moving and unlinking of my diagram took me more than an hour thusfar and I’m not yet finished. Just wanted to do a shoutout that I really really dislike TogetherJ, this kind of tools give java the name that it is slow. While it’s actually not (okay, the startup of the vm has to be included in each app, but once started it really isn’t slow. Really, BUT don’t use it in places where you shouldn’t. Modelling in my eyes is a very graphic intensive thingy,and java isn’t there yet, maybe if they used java3D (may they even use it, don’t know the status of java3D). If you really want to do this you have 2 options imho, do it the mono way then, create a c or c++ object that can do native drawing and create some bindings for it, but then you get the problem of java not being fast going outside the jvm OR just fix the freaking drawing in java and give it a performance boost. Maybe this is already faster in the next editions of j2se, maybe it isn’t really that slow in 2d, but then it’s even worse that would mean that the people over at Borland can’t program and I find that hard to believe!!!
I’m trying to persuade my boss here to use pvanhoof his generator and build some reverse enginering features into it. Let’s hope he goes for it, I did say his code was (L)GPL so all features would have to be commited back to the code.