Netbeans 6.8 UML support

Netbeans has been gaining a lot of popularity over last decade or so and definitely has become forerunner in becoming número UNO in open source development community specially for Java and JEE.

I have been following Netbeans release since 6.x and one of the feature that I really liked was the UML/UML2 diagrams, code generation and reverse engineering. This plugin stayed with the distribution for quite sometime but for some reason this plugin is not supported in the latest release 6.8.

What does that mean to you or me?
Well if you like traditional way of building apps where you first design and then use netbeans to generate the code for you, you are doomed. No longer would your existing uml projects open up, you would not be able to forward or reverse engineer code from/to model.

There is a plugin which Netbeans recommend for UML modelling but if you like the native UI of netebans UML then once again you are doomed.

I wanted to have same UML plugin to work with and the good news I was able to find a workaround which works like a charm. I had two installations of netbeans 6.8 and 6.7 which did suported the UML model projects. All I had to do was copy the “uml” folder from the netbeans 6.7 install directory to 6.8 install directory and voilà I could now create uml projects in 6.8 and open existing uml projects in 6.8 IDE.

Happy modelling.