I am looking at Rational Rose 98. Our company is moving to a client server environment and this tool looks like it could be useful in helping us layout the architecture of our applications. It looks useful for visually separting the front end, the business logic and the database. It also has the ability to create the classes you've designed in VFP, VB, C++, Java etc. It can also take a VFP class and reverse engineer it into a visual model, ready for modification.

The ability to design and automatically create framework for code looks like a time saver, but how much time? Is it worth learning the UML notation and the product features in order to create some class frameworks?

What type of application would benefit from a modeling tool? Are primarily large applications modeled with a tool like this, or would smaller apps benefit?

Microsoft is including Visual Modeler with Dev. Studio Enterprise, which is a paired down version of Rational Rose.

If anyone has any input on these tools, I would appreciate it.

Thanks,

Michael