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,
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