UML Modeling Tool for Eclipse

I want boxes and lines to describe the classes.

I could use:

• Microsoft Power Point (I prefer not)
• Microsoft Visio (I prefer not either. Its not even installed on my machine and am too lazy to find a copy licensed to the company I work for)
• Google Presentation (My favorite choice for general diagramming, but its not a modeling tool)

Well, since I am in this wonderful open-source Java/Eclipse land, there got to be a nice free modeling tools out there.

There seems to be a lot of tools offered out there, and I am very much confused (e.g. there are UML2 SDK, some Graphical modeling tool, and Ecore, and some commercial versions?)

Anyway, I found one that's sufficient for my needs. The choice I made is Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). Actually, there is already a nice tutorial article about EMF.

This is what I did:

First, made a new copy of Eclipse specifically to have modeling related plugins (I wanted to avoid adding too much stuff for feature that may not be used all of the time)

Then hand-picked a couple of items (used the tutorial article I mentioned above).

Now, I can create UML-like class diagram.

I heard that you can generate Java source from the model. I haven't tried it yet but I am sure that would be useful. For now, having a UML-like tool is good enough for me.

TIP: I usually use the light-weight Eclipse class with few server-related plugins. That instance can't handle EMF files - it just shows the content of .ecorediag as plain XML file. That's fine. Only when I need to interact with it in graphical editor, I start "model" version of Eclipse.