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:

st discovered the Eric Python IDE, and I have to say I'm impressed.

I have been using PyDev for Eclipse so far, but was annoyed by the lack of options for the syntax highlighting, leaving me with rather sparingly colored code, which I found a bit hard to read at times. With Eric, I could configure up my favourite scheme (for which the cred goes to Rolf, my father :) ).

I have put the screenshots of my PyDev highlighting scheme, and the Eric one, below, so you can have a look for yourselves:

Eric Python IDE:

I will see soon which IDE I finally ended up using, but so far Eric seems to be the favourite ...

UPDATE: I have now found that Eric IDE lacks code navigation facilities (aka "Go to definition"), which makes it rather useless for my object oriented projects, where lots of code happens away in object methods...