Project Planning? Diagrams and Such.... Best tool?

Question

Hey there,

I started a personal Java WEB project and I'm trying to generate some documentation before I start off.

I'm looking for some cool, flexible and free Diagram tool.

• Cool -> Shapes are colorful and could be used to be presented directly to a client. (Those line based- black/white are awful)
• Flexible -> I'm looking for something can deal with Web world, so besides all those basic diagrams, I would need some Page Flows, User Cases, etc...
• Free -> Please don't make me pay for it, well, maybe if its not that expensive and has all those properties I just talked about, well, I may give it a try.

Also it would be cool to have some integration with Eclipse, but all tools I've seen for Eclipse are not cool(stylish).

Which tools meet does requirements?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I have used StarUML in the past, which is free, but not particularly stylish. It is a nice little UML tool for doing use case diagrams, flow diagrams, etc. If you are looking for a mock-up tool, however, it does not do that really. It mostly understands UML, and does that part really well.

Answer 2

Its main focus is automatic graph layout, but I've used it effectively with customer-friendly images for the nodes: yed

Answer 3

I use the following online tools

1. www.Prezi.com for making presentations. Free for 100 MB.
2. http://www.websequencediagrams.com for generating sequence diagrams.
3. http://creately.com/ for online diagrams and colloboration.
4. http://www.gliffy.com/ for flow charts.

Answer 4

In Eclipse there is GEF, which is a nice programmable framework. It makes sense to use that to generate diagrams directly from your source code.

Answer 5

I am very much enjoying inkscape right now. It is free, it is flexible and it is cool (tight and professional results at least).

However, it is not a UML diagram tool, it is a general purpose drawing tool. However, you can easily make the elements for the diagrams and store them in a file for use later.

It will never be as easy to use as a UML diagram tool, but the results and possibilities outweigh this downside for me, plus you can add non-UML stuff trivially. (I am especially loving the lining up and spacing tools)

Answer 6

You can try out http://yuml.me/. It is a free site to create UML diagrams online.

Also check out Dia a gtk+ based diagram creation program. I am sorry I am not able to post the link for the Dia because of my low reputation points, but a simple Google search for Dia will land on the site.