Good-bye Enterprise Architect - Hello Topcased!

Thanks to recent developments Karsten Thoms (Itemis, financed by the ESRF) we are now switching the EDNA UML modeler tool from Enterprise Architect to Topcased.

Enterprise Architect (EA) has played an important role in the EDNA project from its start till now. EA is a very powerful tool for UML modelling and has served it purpose well. However, the fact that EA is a commercial tool, only runs (well) on Windows and does not support the XMI standard very well has made us to look elsewhere for an EDNA UML modeller.

Since the majority of the EDNA developers use the Eclipse IDE for their developments it was felt that the ideal situation would be to have an Eclipse-based UML modeller for the EDNA developments. Peter Keller (Global Phasing), who has investigated many different solutions, recommended us to try the Topcased UML Editor. This Eclipse-based modeller is open-source and can easily be incorporated into an Eclipse installation.

Unlike EA, the Topcased UML modeller does not create XSD (XML Schema Definition) files from an UML model. These XSD files are necessary for automatically produce the data-binding objects used by the EDNA plugins. On the request of the ESRF Karsten Thoms has produced an Eclipse plugin "UML2XSD" with which it is straight forward to transform an UML model into an XSD file.

Both the kernel and the MXv1 data models have been fully transformed into Topcased UML diagrams and the EA data models are deprecated. The idea is to then slowly migrate all existing EA UML models to Topcased UML models. This migration will soon be simplified thanks to further developments by Karsten Thoms.

For more information on how practically the Topcased UML modeller is used in EDNA see: Data Modeling with the Topcased UML Editor