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star uml, the best free open source uml flow charting software May 27, 2009

Posted by chris in : software , 3comments

A few months ago I was rummaging around my office for a copy of MS Visio, my favorite diagramming tool. Unfortunately I had misplaced it and did not feel like buying a new copy or swiping a pirated version. The free alternatives that I knew of at the time were lacking. My general opinion of most open source desktop software is not that high. The open source community has done great with web apps and server side software, but office tools aren’t really there yet.

Dia is aesthetically appalling and is prone to crashing and umlet is cumbersome and not much better looking. Enter Star UML. Star UML might even be better than Visio. Some of my favorite star uml features are the code generator (supports many languages including PHP), the documentation generator (exports to Word), and the ER diagram. Star UML supports UML diagraming with activity diagrams, use-case models, class diagrams, and many more. Additional extensions give you support for ER database diagrams as well.

I’ll actually write a decent-sized article this time since I feel many of the awesome features in Star UML are unfortunately poorly documented.

PHP Code Generator
The Code generator supports many languages by default, but you will have to download the plugin from the star uml website to get PHP support. Once the plugin is installed (done by simply dropping some files in a plugin folder). Click Tools, then StarUML Generator. In the select the checkbox to the left of “PHP 5 Code Generator v1.0″ and then click Next. Follow the remaining steps are your class diagrams will be converted into wonderful PHP 5 classes. The more time you spend following UML standards, the better the generated code will be.

ER Diagram
This is another plugin that can be downloaded from the Star UML project website. This one took some discovery to get working and unfortunately there isn’t a MySQL code generator for this yet. However the tool works pretty well. Once the plugin has been placed in the right directory and is installed (follow the directions on the project website) you can begin using it.

Open a new project. Select the default option. In your Model Explorer to the right you will see the name of your Model, probably called Untitled with a cube to the left of it. Right-click, select Add, then select Model. Name your model something, how about ER Diagram. Now right click ER Diagram and click Add Diagram, then select ER(IE) Diagram. Now to the left you will see some options for adding a table and linking tables through relations.

Lets add a table, name it anything. By default the table will not be what you want. I named by table “tbl_yo” which now appears in the model explorer. Select the table in the model explorer. In the tables properties (located just below the model explorer) there will be a value called Stereotype. Click the button to the right that has three dots. The stereotype you want to select is called table (ERD). Your table should look a bit different now (the table title is located just above the yellow square. Now add a column called yo_id. This can be done by double-clicking the table and clicking the greenish button. In the model explorer you will see yo_id below tbl_yo. Right click yo_id and select Tagged Values. Checking the PK box will make this a primary key and checking the FK box makes it a foreign key. Selecting either of these will change the logo next to yo_id in the ER view.

That’s all for now, more later. Post if you have any questions.

filtering dynamic ip addresses from google analytics May 4, 2009

Posted by chris in : rant , add a comment

Nice post over at epikone.com on filtering out dynamic ip addresses from google analytics: http://www.epikone.com/blog/2009/04/16/count-me-out-gajs-version/