Thursday, January 13, 2005

IntelliUML Teresa - IntelliJ UML Plugin by beto software

I was having a go at this UML plugin for IntelliJ, I have had a look at a couple of other UML plugins for IntelliJ but they are not worth mentioning. Since this particular one required a license I had a feeling that it should have some quality.
So I got the 30 day trial license and started using it.

One thing to note:- If you download the plugin through IntelliJ IDE (i.e Ctrl-Alt-S followed by 'S') and the if you go and download the the 30 day trial license from www.betosoftware.com/teresa site the plugin doest seem to work !!!
So I had to delete the stuff that was download from IntelliJ and download and install the plugin from www.betosoftware.com/teresa

Using the plugin.

  • Open up your Java Project
  • Select from the Menu: Tools|IntelliJ UML Teresa | Start (This starts up the plugin)
  • Select any class or any package from the Project Exporer and right click and select 'Reverse Engineer' (The Plugin reads the selected class/package)
  • Select from the menu: Window | IntelliJ UML Teresa  (Only the selected class/package that you chose to reverse engineer is displayed in the IntelliJ UML Teresa browser)
  • In the IntelliJ UML Teresa browser right click on any package and select : New | Class Diagram
  • In the IntelliJ UML Teresa browser Select individual classes and right click : Add to  Diagram.

Now you can keep adding classes to your digram and stuff with them like create associations, generalizations etc.
This is quite a good tool if you are creating an new desing from scratch, since you can create a skeleton class structure very fast and once you are finilized with the structure you can go to code and start editing directly (yes it has code and diagram synchronization)

Now since I have been using Together Soft for a long time now ( 3+ years ) my expections are set quite high. I mainly installed this plugin so that I could use UML diagrams like class and sequence since I wanted to learn how and existing program works.

Once I have added the class to the diagram there is no way that I selectively display only the private/protected/public methods/variables of a class. Since my class is really huge with really long method names and a lot of parameters, this one class occupies the entire screen. If you could hide certain details of the class I could possible added more classes to diagram and see how them all together, just to see how they are associated to each other.

I was expecting that there would be some kinda sequence diagram that could be generated for any method, but this plugin only provides me with class diagrams.

Overall a very good plugin, much better than the other UML plugins that I have seen for IntelliJ.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Anything new to Teresa? Does version 2.1 address any of the problems you mention? A more updated review would be nice.

rgds /Markus