State Diagram Editor

[viSci]

Just curious what tools people have found useful for Designing State Diagrams.

Remember the NI State Diagram Toolkit? I wonder if that will ever make a comeback.

I found this free online tool which is pretty neat:

http://www.gliffy.com/

[Antoine Chalons]

Just curious what tools people have found useful for Designing State Diagrams.

Remember the NI State Diagram Toolkit? I wonder if that will ever make a comeback.

Yes, it had a strange life cycle. Not sure I miss it though.

I found this free online tool which is pretty neat:

http://www.gliffy.com/

Looks nice. I use OmniGraffle, it's pretty cool (mac only though).

[Grampa_of_Oliva_n_Eden]

Just curious what tools people have found useful for Designing State Diagrams.

Remember the NI State Diagram Toolkit? I wonder if that will ever make a comeback.

I found this free online tool which is pretty neat:

http://www.gliffy.com/

Last I checked the SDE was available as an add-on. I stopped using it because it turned my code into a white elephant since only my machine had it installed (Yes I know I can right-click disconnect but if I did that on-iste without the SDE, when I got back to the office, I could not "un-disconnect").

THe Statchart was "supposed to be" the replacement but unless you where already familiar with all of the fancy words used the State Chart Toolkit, there was a steep learning curve. In early version it did not handle the local data (the stuff you would normally put in a SR) and would do buffer copies every time you looked. That would be very un-popular with my customers so I dropped learning that critter. since then I have been told that the data copies isue was fixed but I can not confirm.

So for now, I draw them up on napkins or whatever and code em up manually.

Just my two cents. Others taht have a differnet environment may have different opions.

Ben

[PaulL]

We use the Unified Modeling Language. I highly recommend Enterprise Architect as a tool.

[jgcode]

Just curious what tools people have found useful for Designing State Diagrams.

Remember the NI State Diagram Toolkit? I wonder if that will ever make a comeback.

I found this free online tool which is pretty neat:

http://www.gliffy.com/

Ha, I remember the old SDE back in 82 I think, I was recently asking a friend if they had seen it recently.

I think Ben is right and it is now rolled up into the Module add-on and is unavailable - don't know if the SDE is in there or scraped completely but I haven't checked.

[Dragoon235]

If you are looking for just a MS Visio replacement (what giffy seems to be) you might want to try Dia. It was originally a linux app, but it has been ported to Windows.

Dia main site

Dia for Windows

[pallen]

At my last position, all the developers were still using the old State Diagram Toolkit quite heavily.

It had some limitations for sure. A lot of states would mean that any changes or any additional states would take a long time to add. But it's a very easy tool to use.

The new NI tool is a lot different than the older tool. You can do a lot more with it, but there is a learning curve.

As far as documentation goes, occasionally I'll use Visio if I need to show someone else my planned architecture. But usually I'll just be scribbling on a piece of paper and let the code be the documentation.

[Black Pearl]

I use dia for fast scetches. I even wrote a code generator for state machines, look into the LAVAs CR.

Recently I started to play around with eclipse (galileo). That's really powerful (full uml2).

Felix