Building WhiteStarUML with Delphi 10.1 Starter

During the last months the Starter Edition of Delphi 10.1 has been offered for free. I took that occassion to check if it is functional enough to compile WhiteStarUML. The final outcome is satisfactory. While of course having limited features that version of Delphi offers all functionality required to compile WhiteStarUML. The result of that build can be found in the Experimental folder. It was not deeply tested yet it looks to be fully functional. It can be also used as the base for any personal recompilations.

Furthermore all current WhiteStarUML source code can be directly recompiled without any modifications. Possible problems may be related to setting third party packages. The Starter Edition comes without command line tools hence the installer scripts cannot be run and all libraries must be loaded as projects into the IDE and recompiled there. There is also a dependency on the commercial DevExpress GUI library. Of course it is not free but comes with 30 days trial so it may be used to make personalized builds. This situation may also push to revisit the idea of replacing the remaining commercial components with freely available ones and make WhiteStarUML a trully free and open source project. It is a worthy goal yet requires a lot of work and at present there is no good free replacement for the docking library. But making developing WhiteStarUML an approachable task is definetely worth of being considered.

Happy UML modeling and possibly WhiteStarUML hacking in 2017!