Eclipse class designer and design<--> java source bindings

Question

Hi Guys,

I'm tutoring a subject on rapid prototyping at university for 2nd/3rd year students.

Can anyone recommend a (free) way to design class hierarchies in a GUI design surface within Eclipse?

The UML design surfaces in Eclipse Modelling Tools are almost perfect, but I can't find any documentation about how to bind these to java source files.

Leaving aside your personal ideology about how software should be designed, it's very important we have a visual tool.

I've been spoiled in visual studio with bi-directional designer to source mapping. I was hoping to provide a similar tool for my students, but I need some advice in making this happen.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

UPDATE: I'm actually not tutoring on OOD next semester, but on rapid prototyping and software architecture. The aim of this subject is to teach some rapid design techniques leveraging design patterns, using servelets to deliver web pages, etc. Students learning OOD currently use BlueJ. This subject aims to step it up and push them in the deep end with a real IDE.

UPDATE I'm playing with NetBeans w/ UML addon and it's very very good. The only problem with it is that it requires manual "generate code" and "reverse engineer code" button clicks. Way way better than Eclipse. Netbeans is winning the war so far.

Answer 1

BlueJ is a GUI Java IDE that allows students to go from UML diagrams to code. It's free and recently open source.

It also supports extensions similar to popular Eclipse extensions: PMD, checkstyle, etc.

It's specifically designed for teaching:

The BlueJ environment was developed as part of a university research project about teaching object-orientation to beginners.

The aim of BlueJ is to provide an easy-to-use teaching environment for the Java language that facilitates the teaching of Java to first year students. Special emphasis has been placed on visualisation and interaction techniques to create a highly interactive environment that encourages experimentation and exploration.

It includes several tutorials.