the class2uml project pages

Motivation

One useful, widely known and very "eye-catching" fashion to represent the design of a software project is the UML class diagram. In fact, there is a variety of CASE tools allowing to build and manipulate such diagrams as well as to produce code skeletons for programs based on the specifications the author visualised in his diagram.
However, one might want to perform the reverse step: to gain design information from a program, possibly because the original information has been lost or in order to check if what he developed corresponds to the actual design.

Although it might seem straightforward (classes map to class boxes, subclasses to generalisation relationships etc.), it is a difficult issue when treating associations. In a programmer's terms, an association between class A and B occurs if A has a field where it stores Bs. However, associations have cardinalities which tell, again in a programmer's terms, how many B-objects A could reference in his field during the execution of the program.
This is generally impossible to tell, but might be analysed for some cases, and this is the point where class2uml enters with its idea.

What does class2uml do?

The program builds a class diagram recursively parting from one given class. The depth of the recursion can (and should) be limited by the user in order to produce a diagram that is still comprehensible...
The UML elements it displays are:

• classes and interfaces
• generalisations
• dependencies and
• associations (and compositions, which are a special case of associations)

Additionally, class2uml analyses methods for the query property - query methods are said to be those that do not affect the system state.

It then layouts the class diagram using dot from the Graphviz package and draws it in a crude JAVA Swing window. It also exports the diagram into a .dia file, which can be opened with the free diagram editor Dia. By default, this will be the file export.dia.
The latter program allows you to edit the generated class diagram on an UML level, to export it into other formats, to print it and more.

Finally, as its newest feature, it writes its data into XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) file which offers flexible and tool independent treatment of the UML diagram that has been produced. By default, this will be the file export.xmi.
The XMI flavour it uses is the one of the well-known Open Source modelling tool ArgoUML.

Screenshots

Here you can get a more practical impression of the program.

package class2uml;

public class Test {

    public String s = "Hello World!";

    public void helloWorld() {
        System.out.println(s);
    }
}