Gentleware recently released version 4 of “Poseidon for UML” (an UML modeling tool). They said it now respects many more features of UML2 but I am not proficient enough in UML to clearly see all the advantages. But there are still some strange things. Two examples:

1. The default graphics format of Poseidon installed on a Fedora Core 3 is PNG. The default graphics format of Poseidon installed on a Fedora Core 4 is JPG (same with SuSE). I tried to look in the config files (in fact, in all text files in the installation path) but I didn’t find anything related to this topic. It’s probably an OS default setting but I didn’t had the time to check.

2. SVG export is still very “basic”. Indeed, each graphical element isn’t connected to any other element, without any coherence. For example, a class is represented by 4 independant objects: a rectangle, a text for the class name and two lines. Nothing is even grouped! You’ll find an example below. It’s sad because if they simply grouped their objects (e.g. all the graphical objects belonging to the same class), it would have been much more simpler to do final last-minute small modifications to the exported graphics. I don’t know if it’s in the SVG standard but Inkscape now supports “connectors”: graphical objects can now be connected using auto-routing lines. If it’s in the standrad, Gentleware could have used this option.

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