Tuesday 11 November 2008

Web Sequence Diagrams: It doesn't get any more exciting than this...

Ok, a slight exaggeration. You might even accuse me of lying, but I find this pretty damn cool.

Last year I stumbled upon an ingenious tool - Web Sequence Diagrams. By using a markup language, you can draw sequence diagrams without the fuss of Visio, or even Gliffy.

A day in the life of a builder, sequence diagram style...


In just a couple of hours, you can be in diagram heaven. You could flood your desktop with exported versions of the diagrams. You could fill your office with print outs (but consider the environment kids). But there was something missing. There just wasn't an easy way to store them in their raw text format, and view the results... The tool was SCREAMING out for a wiki plugin.

So, I set about writing one. And got no further. Life, well actually work, intervened, as usual.

But fear not (for I know you are trembling with fear and anticipation), others have come to the rescue with a plugin for Confluence and a plugin for the rather wonderful Trac. On top of all this, you can also find a whole set of example scripts for Python, Java, and Ruby. Apparently, you can even render inline markup by using a bit of JavaScript magic, but I haven't quite got that working yet...

Genius.

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