I will be presenting the TextUML Toolkit at this month’s Vancouver Island Java User Group meeting. If you are in the Victoria area, I hope to see you there. It is free, and there will be pizza and drinks. Oh, and there will be a cool demo of the toolkit, including code generation using Acceleo and a quick demo on model execution just to give a hint of what comes next after the toolkit goes GA.

Many thanks to Manfred, the JUG leader, for organizing the meeting, and to Genologics for sponsoring it!

UPDATE: the meeting was great (slides here), got lots of interesting questions and comments, and many in the audience liked the idea of using a textual notation for UML. A bit harder to get buy-in for the idea of UML as programming language. I guess I will need to show something running to get that across too… ;) 

The latest milestone (M3) of the TextUML Toolkit has been declared today, as promised earlier here. As I said before, the focus for this milestone was stability and performance, so you can expect a much snappier and more solid tool. But it also includes some cool new features:

• you can drop UML2 models created elsewhere into a MDD project and you can use them from your TextUML code as you would with models created using the Toolkit
• you can even decompile a UML2 model and read it using the TextUML syntax with the TextUML Viewer (which takes over as the default editor for *.uml files)
• you can auto-format the current compilation unit with Ctrl-Shift-F
• and last but not least: Linux and Mac OS X (Power PC and Intel) are now supported

The main reason for this focus on performance and robustness is that the tool must be something that people can rely upon and become productive with. From now on, real user demand must drive the addition of any new features and bug fixing efforts. So now it is your turn. Download the TextUML Toolkit and start using it for creating your UML models. It is free! If you like the approach of modeling using a textual notation, I am sure you will enjoy it. And even if you haven’t bought the idea yet, give it a try. I would be more than glad of hearing your suggestions and opinions. And more importantly, will make sure that any problems reported will be promptly addressed.

Looking forward to your comments, either here or by e-mail on the Abstratt forum. Cheers.

Rafael