What has been going on with jMDA in the recent year?

When I discussed about jMDA with colleagues and friends in the past it became obvious that one thing is missing. Textual models such as Java source code files in jMDA are fine but graphical models often are sooo muuuch mooore expressive!

I could not disagree with that and because I'm a huge UML fan I started looking around for appropriate Java to UML reverse engineering tools. It soon turned out that it was not easy to find any. Existing products often are extreme heavy weights, clumsy to use, expensive and so on. So I started playing around with an own solution. With jMDA at hand I had everything necessary to find out anything about a given jMDA model so the only thing to do was to bring that model information into an appealing graphical representation. First results looked very promising (at least in my eyes).

But soon some really nasty problems occured. The biggest among them being myself and my lacking knowledge and experience in developing software with a huge amount of obviously non mainstream graphical requirements. I started with a Java Swing approach but got frustrated about a lot of features that seem to be missing.

Then I decided to try JavaFX 2.0. Again first results looked promising but missing basic features were a big disappointment.

After all I spent a lot of time in these investigations during the last year without satisfying results. However recently I became to know UML Explorer which does most of the things I was looking for very nicely in an eclipse environment. So I gave up or at least postponed my plans for an own solution. This will allow to concentrate on developing new and improving existing features for the actual jMDA products.