EmphasizedInsanity at /life

As the strategic value of software increases for many companies, the industry looks for techniques to automate the production of software and to improve quality and reduce cost and time-to-market.
These techniques include component technology, visual programming, patterns and frameworks. Businesses also seek techniques to manage the complexity of systems as they increase in scope and scale. In particular, they recognize the need to solve recurring architectural problems, such as physical distribution, concurrency, replication, security, load balancing and fault tolerance. Additionally, the development for the World Wide Web, while making some things simpler, has exacerbated these architectural problems. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) was designed to respond to these needs and to supply the programmers and the project managers with a visual application state and layout.
There isn’t a clear why to implement the usage of UML for rails development, but here are the tools i did find.

• RailsRoad is a RailRoad is a class diagrams generator for Ruby on Rails applications. It’s a Ruby script that loads the application classes and analyzes its properties (attributes, methods) and relationships (inheritance, model associations like has_many, etc.) The output is a graph description in the DOT language, suitable to be handled with tools like Graphviz. Last tested on old rails versions!


• A visual paradigm plugin for generating ruby (yap, not rails)


• ruby-uml, couldn’t find any documentations.
  

• The generate_from_uml plugin does the oppsite and enerates rails models from a UML schema, i didn’t see how advanced relations are handled though (:has_many :through for example)