Microsoft recently provided me with yet another reason to dump Office, so I finally got off of my duff and made the switch to OpenOffice 2.0 Beta 2 over the weekend (downloaded via BitTorrent of course).
I’ve been trying it out on and off since well before Sun started contributing resources to it, and it’s really came a long way over the years. For instance, I used it extensively last summer for a month when I did a trial to see if I was ready to switch to Linux on the desktop yet (the answer was no), and even in that time I’m still very impressed with its progress.
Thus far I’ve used it to write some Use Case documents for my Object Oriented Analysis and Design class, as well as a spreadsheet for a home project that I’m working on, and it works great! It almost seemed like it was intelligent enough to figure out the type of document as I was writing it because it would suggest words such as “Precondition” when I typed “Pre” for instance– impressive!
One shortcoming of OpenOffice is that it doesn’t seem to have a suitable Visio clone. Generally I avoid using Visio if I can and use Enterprise Architect instead as you can actually write UML 2.0 compliant documents natively and do code and database engineering with it to many languages and platforms. In fact, you can even do code engineering for ColdFusion (thanks to Mike Rankin) in EA. However, there are a few things I still use Visio for on occasion for such as Network Diagrams and prototyping GUI’s.
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If you want a free diagramming tool, try dia. (http://www.gnome.org/projects/dia/).
why the need to grab it via bittorrent? is it not readily available from the website?
Yeah, you can download it from the website. I however prefer to use BitTorrent if it’s an option (it’s also what I use for Linux & FreeBSD ISO’s). It’s very fast, it saves donation dependent entities some bandwidth, and think that it serves a very legitimate purpose despite what the RIAA might say about the evils of file sharing.
COOL! Another EA user. I’m constantly amazed at what you can actually squeeze out of that program. You can actually do network diagrams that are UML oriented. You can even change the image that’s on the deployment diagram. You just right click on the element on the drawing and select appearance/alternate image and pull in whatever you want.
I pretty much do just about anything to avoid using visio. Mostly because of the time I’ve wasted trying to get it to do basic uml drawings.
Dont’ get me wrong, EA DEFINITELY has a few rough edges, but I think it makes up for that with the amount of time I’ve saved just doing simple drawings.
You can even do a little gui design in there, but I tend to use Dreamweaver in wysiwyg mode for quick mockups. And yes, I actually use the design mode of DW occasionally as hard as that is to do for some developers.
Btw, I have no relationship with EA, I just like the product.
All this talk of (free open source) good stuff and I go to check out Enterprise Architect and it’s almost Windows-only (runs on x86 Linux with lots of additional supporting software to emulate Windows).
C’mon, where’s the free open source UML stuff?
p.s. Always glad to see more people switching to OpenOffice.org! I’m a diehard NeoOffice/J user (OOo for Mac with a Java UI skin).
Yeah, sorry Sean. EA is the only one I know of that will generate CFC’s currently, other than a very hacky way in Visio. I really find Visio’s UML functionality to be useless, especially since it doesn’t even fully support UML 2.0 without downloading 3rd party templates, can’t engineer code easily, etc. It does do a pretty good job of reverse engineering SQL Server databases, but it would be heresy if it didn’t.
I have yet to find an open source UML editor that I would even think about using on a daily basis. Really even all of the commercial ones I’ve tried rub me the wrong way (I’ve even tried the various Rational products, etc). But if anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears!
One would think with the number of different software packages out there, someone would have got a UML editor to a level where there wasn’t something overly sucky about it in one way or the other by now.
ArgoUML is the leading open source UML modeling tool and includes support for all standard UML 1.4 diagrams. It runs on any Java platform and is available in ten languages. http://argouml.tigris.org/
I’ve just written a post about migrating completely from Microsoft to Linux.
I hope the whole world switches to Open-Source one day
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