Using Violet

Introduction

Violet is a simple, free, and attractive editor for UML diagrams. (Many editors are lacking in one or more of these qualities!) Violet also supports use case diagrams, and its state diagram mode can be used for use cases (though that's not what it is really intended for).

Running Violet

Type

/classes/cs329/violet/run-violet

into your shell. You should get a splash screen, followed shortly by either a rather Windows-like display allowing you to select a drawing type or a recent file, or the editor window itself.

If you get the Windows-like display, choose an existing file you want to open or select "Class Diagram" to create a new UML class diagram, "Use Case Diagram" to create a new use case diagram, or "State Diagram" to create use cases.

Using Violet

There's not much to using Violet:

Click on the desired diagram tool (right side of the window).
Click in the drawing area to place a thing or click-and-drag from one thing to another to place a connecting arrow or line.
Right-click on the thing or line you've just placed to configure its options (including naming it, adding attributes or methods to a class, adding annotations to the line, etc).
Save when you are done (and periodically along the way in case something crashes).
Maybe print your diagram, too.

Using Violet Outside the Lab

I've found Violet to be pretty much unusable when run over the network (i.e. displayed on a machine other than the one where it is running). If you want to use it on your own computer:

You'll need Java 6 update 10 (or higher) installed on your computer. (Run java -version to see what version you have - it should be jdk1.6.0_10 or higher.) Earlier versions of Java 6 can be used to create and save diagrams, but you won't be able to print. (download Java)
Copy /classes/cs329/violet/com.horstmann.violet-0.21.1.jar to your own computer (via scp - ask if you don't know how to do this).
Change to the directory where you put the jar file on your own computer and run as
```
  java -jar com.horstmann.violet-0.21.1.jar &
```
You may need to specify the path to your java installation.

This should work on Windows and Mac as well as Linux. (On Windows you may be able to double-click on the jar file to run it.)