Traditionally, graphical UML tools haven't particularly caught on in the embedded space, because too often they fail to pull their own weight. Many developers find themselves fighting such tools at every step of the way: from drawing the diagrams to trying to live in a straight jacket of the generated code.
The new, free QM tool from Quantum Leaps is different, because it was designed from the ground up around the code-centric approach. Unlike other graphical tools, QM gives you complete control over the generated code structure, directory names, file names, and elements that go into every file. You can mix your own code with the synthesized code and use QM to generate as much or as little of the overall code as you see fit. At the low level, QM respects your graphical layout as much as possible and will not re-attach or re-route connectors, resize nodes, or adjust text annotations. You will find that you don't need to fight the tool.
Even though a lot of effort went into making QM as UML-compliant, the tool is innovative and might work DIFFERENTLY than other graphical state machine tools on the market. For example, QM does not use "pseudostates", such as the initial pseudostate or choice point. Instead QM uses higher-level primitives of initial-transition and choice-segment, respectively. This simplifies state diagramming immensely, because you don't need to separately position pseudostates and then connect them. Also, QM introduces a new notation for internal transitions, which allows actual drawing of internal transitions (in standard UML notation internal transitions are just text in the state body). This notation enables showing internal transitions with regular state transitions in a choice point--something that comes up very often in practice and was never addressed well in the standard UML.
The QM tool is available now for a FREE download and free, unrestricted use from
Miro Samek state-machine.com
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