PlantUML (Open Source Awesomeness)

I've always had a soft spot for diagrams. I think that representing information in various visual ways tremendously helps our thinking and understanding. Unfortunately it is often a big headache to create (and maintain) diagrams.

So I was very pleased today when I came across PlantUML. PlantUML is a Java library and web service which renders UML diagrams from text input. Take the following text definition for example:

@startuml
object Object01
object Object02
object Object03
object Object04
object Object05
object Object06
object Object07
object Object08

Object01 <|-- Object02
Object03 *-- Object04
Object05 o-- "4" Object06
Object07 .. Object08 : some labels
@enduml

This will be rendered into the following diagram:

PlantUML does not just support object diagrams but also many other types of diagrams. There is another service, called WebSequenceDiagrams which focusses on only sequence diagrams (and is not open source) but can be useful if more visually pleasing sequence diagrams are required,