dsl VS c4model-visio-stencil

1. not currently, but it's on the roadmap!

2. with any integration, if there's enough demand, we'll do it. Once we add interactivity to diagrams, it should be trivial to emulate. However I should mention that Simon Brown (the creator of C4) has his own DSL for C4 https://github.com/structurizr/dsl)! We have no intention of competing with it.

3. Currently the options to tune are limited. The Terrastruct app has granular layout control via drag-and-drop, and we're working to bring some of that to native/open-source.

It's really just an evolution of the original Structurizr for Java library that I built 5+ years ago. Some people really liked the ability to create a model+views using a programming language (ports are now available for .NET, PHP, Python, TypeScript, etc), but many thought it was silly. So I've always wanted to do something "text-based", but I wanted to do "models as code" rather than "diagrams as code". The lockdown in 2020 gave me some time to do this, and the DSL is really just a thin wrapper on that original Java library. Being a wrapper for the Java library provides a way for you to create parts of your model via scripts (Groovy, Kotlin, JRuby) or by mixing the DSL and code. This creates opportunities for manually defining a high level model, and then perhaps inserting a deployment architecture that's automatically generated by parsing AWS/Azure/Terrform/etc.

Some helpful URLs, IMHO

https://structurizr.com/dsl?example=amazon-web-services (hover over the diagram and press the play icon to trigger the "animation" referenced in the DSL)

https://structurizr.com/products as for "which parts are free vs paid"

https://github.com/structurizr/dsl#readme (one of several repos, but unclear which is the "main one") they all seem to be Apache 2 licensed

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I'm just serving as lazyweb bot, I haven't used this product(service?) before

Thanks for structurizr DSL. I'm a big fan of C4 and plantUML. I'll definitely have a look at https://github.com/structurizr/dsl.

Structurizr DSL - https://github.com/structurizr/dsl

The C4 model and the Structurizr DSL (demo) are pretty much designed to do exactly this. Disclaimer: I'm the author of both.

Create a system landscape, plus a drill-down for each system. In this option you create a new repo in which you define your system landscape - i.e. all of the people and software systems, plus their interactions. In the system1 repo, you extend this model to add the internal details, diagrams, and docs specifically for system1. Repeat for system2 and system3. With this approach, you would see that system1 (and system1.serviceX) interacts with system2, but you wouldn't see system2.serviceY, since that's an implementation detail of, and internal to, system2. The Structurizr DSL has been designed to work for this use case with the "workspace extension" feature, see https://github.com/structurizr/dsl/tree/master/docs/cookbook/workspace-extension for more details.

This (icepanel.io) is just a graphical editor for C4 Model diagrams.

The actual standard (if you can call it that, because it is quite light weight, and that is a good thing) is open source as far as I know.

This means that you can create C4 diagrams with PlantUML [0] or using the C4 specific DSL [1].

[0] - https://github.com/plantuml-stdlib/C4-PlantUML

[1] - https://github.com/structurizr/dsl

With this in mind, the Structurizr DSL provides a way to create a model as code, which can then be rendered using tooling of your choice. The Structurizr renderer is one option, but there are others, and you can build your own to meet the style that you're looking for. See structurizr.org - Rendering tools for more.

The Structurizr DSL now provides a way to run scripts written in Groovy, Kotlin, Ruby, and JavaScript, via the new !script keyword. This gives you access to the underlying Structurizr for Java workspace, for when you need to do something not supported by the DSL.