The German based Gentleware has announced their 2.0 release for their popular Posiedon for UML product. The new release claims that the look-and-feel of the diagrams have been completely rewritten which seeing the changes seems nice but what is really nice is the addition of allowing UML diagrams to be saved in the new Diagram Interchange standard that is shared by other UML tools like Telelogic, Togethersoft, Rational, Softeam, I-Logix. While the community version is still at 1.6 the 2.0 version is available for a 15 day evaluation.

For those who are not familier with this product it was evloved from the opensource product ArgoUML, http://argouml.tigris.org.

View Posiedon

The email I received from gentleware says that this is not a release but a beta version :"Today we are pleased to announce the beta release of Poseidon for UML 2.0".

I only see the beta version on their website.
Where is the RELEASE version?

It is just a beta.

Hi,

my name is Marko Boger and I am head of Gentleware. Thanks for this announcement. I just wanted to confirm that the announced release is the beta version of Poseidon for UML 2.0. We are preparing for the final release in just a couple of weeks.

I would also like to confirm that this new release stores models in the standard saving format of UML 2.0, it includes the new Diagram Interchange Standard. Actually, Gentleware has led the standardization process of this new saving format and is first to implement it. Other tool vendors have supported our submission and have announced to implement it also. This will soon allow a seamless interchange of models between different modeling tools.

If you want to try it out you can download and test the tool from http://www.gentleware.com. The saved file has the ending .zuml and is a zipped file. It can be unzipped with any standard zip tool. It then contains one XMI file that includes not only the model but also all diagram information.

Regards, Marko Boger

Marko,

I'm concerned about integration of UML diagrams with version control systems. It seems that neither the prior format (zargo) nor this (zuml) plays well with a VCS, as they are binary file formats, so you have to store the whole file in the VCS and you cannot track modifications. Your words seem to imply that there is a whole XMI file that includes the whole model, so, in case you would automate the edit/unzipping/commit and update/zipping/edit process, it would be cumbersome to control concurrent modifications in case of large models.

Are there any plans to provide an easy and convenient integration with VCS? Do you have any advices regarding this issue?

Thanks, regards

Hi,

version control is certainly an important issue. To be honest, it was one of the biggest concerns why we got engaged with the standardization process of Diagram Interchange. While it is true that the final saving format is zipped and thus binary, it is now no problem to simply export to XMI (we simply don't zip). By default we do zip because it reduces the file size dramatically but you will be able to simply export the XMI from Poseidon in the next version.

That solves the problem of getting in in and out of a VCS. However, it does not solve the problem of cooperative work or of merging different versions. And a pure line-based merge as in cvs does not help because the file format of XMI is highly structured. The structure usually would get destroyed in a merge. So we need a special solution to that. Gentleware is developing an Enterprise Edition that will solve just that problem. It will allow multiple users to work in parallel on the same model at the same time as well as a different times. This will be released by the end of this year.

Regards, Marko