Chris Johnston

Gentleware has released version 3.2 of their UML modelling tool, Poseidon for UML. Probably the biggest highlight from this release is the vastly improved Sequence diagrams. This has been one of Poseidon’s weakest spot. No more. Gentleware has greatly improved the app’s support for creating sequence diagrams.

However, I can not recommend this product. I downloaded the Community Edition and on first glance, it is a much improved product. However, it seems they may have released it too early. Setting aside the frequent crashes, the app is extremely buggy. One of the biggest bugs that I have encountered is the class diagrams. In Poseidon, there is a quick enter button for adding attributes and methods to a class. I clicked on this button and instead of adding a default method that can then be edited, the program simply adds a blank line. When I go and try to edit the line, it is like the font colour is set to white. So I click on the background to end editing the class and the class name disappears. This can get very annoying after a bit.

A friend of mine was working with Poseidon and had everything disappear on him (his words, and since I was not there, I am not sure what “everything” actually refers to.)

Another problem that I have been having is if I try to directly edit the name of a class, or method in the properties box and then press Ctrl-S to save the project, the app freezes on me and I have to kill it manually.

In my experience, Poseidon has been a quirky UML modelling tool that, although it did somethings oddly–like sequence diagrams–was still a very good tool due to its simplicity and ease of user. However, now it is a frustrating tool that is just too buggy to use. Personally, I am probably going to go back to version 3.1 or find another tool until they work out some of these problems.

I highly recommend that if you are thinking of upgrading, don’t. At the very least, take this new version for a very long test drive before investing any money in it.