Samuel's Tech Blog

I've been looking into ways to generate python code from UML. I tried Enterprise Architect from Sparx systems, which is indeed an impressive product, but since the code generation lacked features I wished for anyway, I thought looking into the open source alternatives might be worth it.

I tried some UML tools like Umbrello, Gaphor, StarUML etc but they all were either not mature enough, or had problems running on Linux or Linux/Wine.

I finally settled on ArgoUML, which feels mature enough. And there is the ArgoUML-python plugin, for python code generation (see also this question on StackOverflow, for a background to my choice). Unfortunately there is no binaries available for download, so you have to build them yourself. That was not much of a hassle at all in Eclipse though, so I'll go through the steps here:

Create the source directories for both argouml, and argouml-python. I have:

  /home/samuel/src/argouml
  /home/samuel/src/argouml-python

• In the first one, do:

 svn co http://argouml.tigris.org/svn/argouml/trunk . --username guest

• ... and in the second folder:

 svn co http://argouml-python.tigris.org/svn/argouml-python/trunk . --username guest

• Open up Eclipse, in a new workspace.
• Right click in the main file navigator
• Choose "Import"
• Choose "General > Import existing projects ..."
• Select the source folder for /home/samuel/src/argouml
• Do the same for the argouml-python folder
• Let the workspace finalize the building process in the background (make sure you have turned automatic building "on" in "Project > Build Automatically".
• Right click the build.xml in the argo-uml project and click "Run as > Ant task..." (Note the three dots!)
• Check the box at the "jar" line (right under the "compile" one).
• Run
• Mark the argo-uml project in the navigator and click F5 to refresh the file tree. You will now see a directory named "build", where the argouml-python.jar" file is located.
• Open that "build" directory in your file browser, and copy it into the "ext" folder in your argouml program directory.
• Fire up ArgoUML
• Done!