And we’ll put some queues in to make the process asynchronous (just because we are cool). We have a client who orders from the menu, an inventory against which the order is checked, and a feedback system to be able to correct the order. (All those swimlanes and blocks that need to be aligned, don’t make me started.) We’re designing an automated restaurant order system (no waiter, just a tablet to order with - know what I mean?) and need a bird’s view of the basic flow. Let’s try a sequence diagram, because it’s the one that usually gives me a lot of headache. As my tool of choice is IntelliJ IDEA, this is the plugin I use. It can be installed locally as a separate tool or as a plugin to basically anything (Wikis, forums, text editors, IDEs and what not, check the link and chances are, you will find at least several alternatives that you’re already using). How to use PlantUML? Actually, in a hundred ways. It has its own pretty simple DSL and allows for a lot of the types of UML diagrams:Īlso, it supports some non-UML diagrams which are pretty cool, for example the Wireframe diagrams for UI design, which seems a really interesting concept. PlantUML allows to basically write text which is automatically transformed into the diagrams. It turns out, however, that there’s a tool that allow you to have a best of both worlds. Especially for people who might be, let’s say, artistically challenged. It is much easier to type “Service A uses Service B” than draw those boxes on a diagram, label them, connect them with arrows etc. The diff itself won’t be much help at all. If you change the picture in a repo, people will not know what the change was about, until they check out the repo and have a look at the picture. You can keep pictures under version control, however, they are binary files, and the changes are therefore obfuscated. And is much easier therefore to store in the repository. A text file size is usually times and times smaller than any picture. A lot of people absorb written information better than anything else, despite that saying about one picture being better than a thousand words. Why do it? Well, code has a few advantages over, well, diagrams: However, this article deals with something else entirely: diagrams as code. Terraform, OpenShift, CloudFormation, Helm, Puppet and many other tools are the representatives of this trend. What can we represent as code except for the programs? First of all, infrastructure as code is gaining popularity - it is enough to see the Google Trends graph for it to see that it is steadily climbing year by year. Everything “as code” is all the rage now.

Plantuml sequence diagram online