Rational Rose was the most accepted UML product from IBM. it became more popular after the integration with some popular development IDEs like Microsoft's visual studio and Borland JBuilder. Rose is simple, powerful and efficient, but the licensing is a bit costly, and i was working with a single license, i.e only one person can access and use it at a time. and they are well enjoyed their monopoly in this area. Microsoft published a UML designer visual modeler with their Visual Studio 6 Tools, but that wasn't a success, only a small percentage of MS guys knows about the tool itself. but that was quite useful ( for class diagrams, sequence diagrams etc..). if you are not a serious UML customer, still you can use MSVM for your needs.
But now, things are getting a new twist. the StarUML
is introduced in to the development community. their latest version StarUML 5.0 is loaded with lots of features which can beat the Rational Rose in every sense. it supports UML 2.0 specification and Model Driven Architecture ( MDA ).Code generation can be done for Java, C++ and C# - and documentation can be generated for all of the Microsoft Office suite programs such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. StarUML is easily extensible through modules using a COM-based plug-in architecture - and by use of templates allowing you a make new code generators. StarUML even imports from Rational Rose.
So the future is for such star performing open source products? IBM is also slipping its hands from their monopoly?. i very much liked this product, and i am planning to take a session on it during the next BarCampKerala event in cochin.
