

It is easy, but slightly different for each type of diagram, so it is good to have the documentation readily available.

PlantUML is easy to use, but you have to learn the syntax. Widget -> DB : To it! As you can see, it is very readable, and it will take care of most of the work for you, placing the components where needed, taking care of the connections between each, etc.Īnother huge advantage is that, since the diagram is defined as code, you can version it using Git! This will become invaluable when working on a project with teammates, where multiple people will work in common on the architecture, and also to easily see the evolution of the design throughout the different commits (let’s be real, it’s never finished until you’re done with the implementation).
#Plantuml sequence diagram online code
For example, here is an example of sequence diagram, with the code and the corresponding User PlantUML has defined a syntax used to generate those diagrams, and will automatically generate the corresponding image.

If you take a look at the diagram at the start of the article, it is made in less than 15 lines of very easy to write text! PlantUML is an online application where you can design any kind of UML diagram by describing it using text. I wish I had discovered this tool earlier, because it would have saved me probably close to 100 hours already. For the development of my end of study project, my team and I had to create more than 30 diagrams of different types, for very complex systems, and it would take up to hours for a single diagram. Overall, it is quite painful to make a lot of diagrams with the tools mentioned above.
#Plantuml sequence diagram online software
It supports pretty much an endless amount of different diagrams and configurations, but it is also very cumbersome to use and it will take up to hours to do a big diagram.Īn alternative that I like is StarUML, which is a downloadable software made specifically for UML designing (who would have guessed from the name?), which makes it a bit faster to use, but still not perfect. There is a plethora of tools available to design such UML diagrams, with the most famous being draw.io. I talked about the design aspect of my work in my article 1 day in the life of an Amazon Software Engineer, and it will more often than not involve some diagrams. It is very powerful and very useful, and most professionals will always do at least a few basic diagrams to represent the architecture and the infrastructure of their software before starting to write it.
