dagre VS c4-notation

It was unmaintained for a long time (maybe considered done implementing the algorithm it set out to), but recently a Google engineer has revived it: https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre

The issue I have with a lot of these tools is they work fine when depicting relationships between tables in the same schema (talking mainly about PostgreSQL databases), but few support showing relationships between tables across different schemas.

Also, when the number of tables grows large, few have layouts arranged in an optimal way. I use D2 (https://d2lang.com/) to create ERDs. However, of the free layout engines available in D2, Dagre (https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre) and ELK (https://github.com/eclipse/elk) both don't have optimal placement of layouts for a sufficiently complicated database.

You are right, after a bit of searching found nice library: https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre and couple of others. Maybe will try it out.

I am using ReactFlow with Dagre to create reasonably simple graph flows as the following example:

Hello,

I've been researching layered graph algorithms, but it appears that this market is mostly inactive at the moment.

Dagre (https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre) is considered outdated, with a codebase from 2015 that is no longer being updated, although they still accept some pull requests.

KLAY (https://github.com/kieler/klayjs) has been succeeded by ELK, and development stopped in 2016.

ELK (https://github.com/kieler/elkjs) is currently being developed by the KIELER Project, mostly by students and professors, written in Java. They are doing a great job, but the library is written in Java and then transpiled to JavaScript. They also rely on students for help with the development, which makes progress slow.

Do you happen to know of any new projects that are actively addressing this problem?

dagrejs has a section on "Recommended Reading" which lists which algorithms from which papers they implement.

https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre/wiki#recommended-reading

Terrastruct engineer here. The visualization will be open source though I can't say for sure yet whether it'll be with our layout algorithm or with https://github.com/dagrejs/dagre.

Another option is Dagre which is apparently now abandoned.

Second this.

Reference for anyone looking I to it: https://c4model.com/

There is also quite a lot of options for helping create these diagrams. I've found https://structurizr.com/ to be the best of what I've tried so far.

What you are describing sounds a lot like C4: https://c4model.com/

The C4 model [0] provides a mostly sensible structure and techniques for representing pure software systems across different abstraction levels.

For systems involving software and hardware, or other complex interfacing (both technology and bureaucracy) this starts to delve into the universe of systems engineering. There's a decent assembly of knowledge on that in the SEBoK [1].

As another commenter has already called out too, one of the most valuable sources of information is also _why_ a system is in its current form and _how_ that's changed over time. ADR's [2] really do a good job at nailing this for just about any scale.

[0]: https://c4model.com

[1]: https://sebokwiki.org

[2]: https://adr.github.io

There a various standards for documenting software architecture, like arc42 or C4. While useful and somewhat well-known (there is certainly a correlation here), here architecture documentation can be further simplified, particularly due to the self-similarity of project and component. Following is a small template, that can also serve as a project's and component's README:

I would suggest that if your architecture diagrams are a bunch of icons provided by AWS/Azure/GCP with lines pointing at each other... you are doing it wrong.

The 'what does this box do for my system' is vastly more important than the 'which in vogue offering from my cloud provider implements it'.

I highly suggest folks take a look at the C4 Model: https://c4model.com/

We often use abstractions in software engineering to communicate complex architectures and software systems. In this article, we’ll discuss how abstractions are inherently hierarchical and how the C4 model provides a nested structure for defining your software architecture. We’ll then cover how IcePanel allows you to create interactive and zoomable diagrams for your audience to zoom in and out of different levels of technical detail.

You probably want https://c4model.com/ which explains what a C4 architecture diagram is. (See the first footnote in the article.)