Welcome to http://ood.sourceforge.net/

Thanks for stopping by to check out this new SourceForge project, "OOD." You're certainly wondering what this project is about.

OOD is a C++ forward-, reverse-, and round-trip-engineering visual CASE tool for object-oriented development and documentation. Modern, production software development has universally moved in the direction of object oriented techniques, because of the proven increases is software reusability and reliability afforded through the correct use of OO technology. An increasingly important component of OO development is a visual OO CASE tool which can visually document the relationships between classes (via a class diagram) and do round-trip engineering (parsing and generation of source code). OOD can currently accomplish these tasks.

Originally developed under Solaris, OOD can also compile with a bit of tweaking under Linux. One of the highest priorities at this point is to make the Linux version more stable so that Linux developers can compile and contribute more easily to the project.

As far as I know, OOD is the only open source CASE tool which can, today, successfully reverse engineer C++ code and produce class diagrams. Lots of open source CASE tools or diagramming tools talk about plans for C++ support: OOD offers it today. The reverse engineering engine is not perfect, mind you, but it does run on much C++ code and work is in progress to expand the capabilities of the reverse engineering engine.

Originally, this was a public domain project developed as a university project for his students by Prof. Tae Gyun Kim of Pusan, Korea. His home page is http://www.comp.pufs.ac.kr/~ktg; the original OOD home page is also located there. Unfortunately, Prof. Kim is no longer continuing development of his excellent CASE tool. I believe it is currently one of the best and most promising open source CASE tools available, with a functioning C++ reverse engineering and code generation engine.

In the hopes of producing a high quality open source CASE tool under Linux, I am in the process of moving the OOD source code to SourceForge, to provide a permanent home for the project and to encourage developers to contribute to the project.

OOD is a bit rough on the edges. It crashes sometimes; the user interface is a bit awkward; the wish list of features is long.

But as any real hacker knows, a working core of code which addresses and solves the major technical issues represents the first milestone of any real-life software development project. Indeed, this milestone can be the genesis of a successful open source project.

It is my opinion that OOD has reached this first milestone. All the parts are there to make a great open source C++ OO CASE tool. OOD has the chance to increase the quality of open source software by allowing software developers to use a free CASE tool to document and analyze their object oriented code. A good CASE tool can radically improve and accelerate high-quality, object-oriented software development. Let's all help to make OOD become the OO CASE tool you always wanted!