umple/umple: Umple Release 1.31.0

Umple release 1.31.0 contains all changes from April 9th 2021 to July 9th 2021

This is one of the most significant Umple releases in a couple of years. The changes include important improvements to end-user experience (of those developing with Umple) and the experience of those developing Umple itself.

Changes include:

Major refactoring of the source code structure of the Umple compiler (its .ump files in cruise.umple/src) to improve understandability, enable product-line creation and variants using mixsets, and simplifying some files. PRs involved in this include #1678, #1679, #1680, #1681, #1682, #1685, #1686, #1687, #1688. #1694, #1706, #1711, #1714, #1718, #1730, #1736, #1738, #1748, #1761, #1763. This work is by PhD student Abdulaziz Algablan @gublan24

Natural language descriptions of associations now appears in the GraphViz class diagrams in UmpleOnline. Hover over either end of an association to see the information pop up. PR #1683. This helps users better understand models.

Improvements to tooltips in various places in UmpleOnline to help users understand the interface #1689, #1708, #1731, #1768, #1772, #1779, #1782

A new 'Tip of the day' feature added to provide users with some insights into things they can do with Umple. A message appears at the top of UmpleOnline if there is not urgent message from the system. PRs #1696, #1707 for issue #1636 More tips will be added in the future.

Improvements to tasks, such as being able to cancel the task creation process. PR #1715 for issue #1697

The 'generate' menu in UmpleOnline now keeps the same target (e.g. Java, PhP, State Table), when loading a new example. This allows easier comparing of outputs from the examples. PR #1729

Introduction of a capability to survey random users about their experience with UmpleOnline PRs #1735 and #1774 for issue #1695. This will help us gather information to further improve Umple. Surveys will only be discretely prompted after a user has worked with Umple for a while and done a non-trivial amount of editing, and if the user accepts to answer the short survey, it will appear in a separate tab so as not to disrupt work. UOttawa ethics approval was obtained to enable this.

Small changes to colours in UmpleOnline to improve user experience and readability PR #1737

Opening Yuml in a separate tab PR #1739

Improvements to JSON generation to make it more readable PR #1740

The latest version of JQuery has been incorporated. PRs #1771 and #1778

Bug fixes, including

• improvements to loading tasks #1713
• removal of invalid show/hide button in some cases #1732
• proper counting of edits in UmpleOnline #1766 for issue #1747
• fixing glitches when resizing the UmpleOnline window #1777 for issue #1663
• removing an inactive copy-to-clipboard icon #1781
• ensuring the URL for a displayed example doesn't disappear too soon #1785
• Fixes to joint.js that had caused a hang PRS #1787 and #1789 for issue #1786
• fixing a stack overflow crash in SQL generation PR #1788 for issue #1767

The VML jar (an old alternative compiler) and its webpage have been removed since the features have been subsumed into the Mixsets capability of Umple. #1746

There have been many improvements to the Umple command line compiler options (run the umple.jar with --help to see full details). Improvements include

• allowing a sequence of compilations to be done at once, as specified in a file that lists sets of Umple files and/or mixsets one per line
• internal compilation of Java when the -c option is used (to speed up compilation, although this increases the size of the compiler jar). #1780. The above are used internally in the manual and example tests to speed up the build considerably PR #1784.

Improvements to the build process, including better building and testing with Gradle (issue #1609), PRs #1716, #1762, #1773. The Gradle build is now the default build in the new Jenkins CI server, although the ant build is still available and is used in Appveyor

Automated user interface tests, which had been previously developed have now been further polished. PR #1783 for issue #363 Further work on these will be ongoing. To run these tests from the build directory:-

• gem install rspec capybara cuprite selenium-webdriver
• ant -f build.websitetests.xml "-DhostName=http://cruise.local/umpleonline/" doWebsiteTests (where the hostname is your own host)

Various updates to the umple website including #1776

Each Umple release now has a DOI associated with it to allow citations. A badge appears in the Github main page for Umple.

The umple-n.n.n-rrrr-hhhhhhhh,jar is the command line compiler

When you do a build in ant, a symbolic link is made on linux and mac calling this umple.jar in the dist directory. The hhhhhhhh is the git commit, and the rrrr is an incrementing count of the number of commits to master.

For the latest Eclipse Plugin see https://github.com/umple/umple/wiki/InstallEclipsePlugin (usually released a while after each main release)

Plugins for VS-Code and homebrew are also available.

When you build Umple, you will also generate other jars including umpledocs, to create the user manual; umplerun, a special tool for simulation, and umplesync, an extended compiler used by Umpleonline.

For details on how to install see http://dl.umple.org

See also http://docker.umple.org for pre-built UmpleOnline environments you can run locally (Click on the Tags tab to see the available releases)