Back at school I had to learn to make UML diagrams and such, and it was a pretty bad experience. We had to use Rational Rose (now owned by IBM, I think), and not only it was super expensive, but it was buggy. Very buggy. Worse than any Microsoft product.
Now, almost 6 years later, I download NetBeans 5.5 Preview and play with it a little bit. It has round-trip UML diagrams, that is you draw class diagrams and such and you get code. A "design center" that generates GoF patters on pre-existing classes. And I won't even start talking about the XML schema editor that can generate HTML documentation and display usage diagrams on-the-fly.
And let me just completely ignore all those server-side thingies like the integrated Sun Java System Application Server, the BPEL state machine thing to integrate web services, and the built-in Apache Derby database, of course.
... I'll come back with a better review later. For now I'll have to catch my breath...
Published on April 22, 2006 at 12:13 EDT
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