intellij-plugins VS plantuml

Ensure that you have installed Maven. You can see the step here. You could install a Java IDE. Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse is recommended.

Developer tools are designed for software development and integration. Therefore, they rely on robust IDEs like Visual Studio or IntelliJ, which offer advanced coding, debugging, and project management features.

JetBrains IDEA or Visual Studio Code or another tool to edit JavaScript code. Console.

A popular Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that provides powerful refactoring capabilities for various programming languages, including Java, Kotlin, and JavaScript. It offers automated refactorings, such as extracting methods, renaming variables, and introducing variables

IntelliJ IDEA stands out as a premier IDE for Java and Kotlin developers, offering a comprehensive development environment far beyond what a simple code editor like Atom provides. This IDE excels with advanced features such as deep code understanding for superior navigation and refactoring. Unlike basic editors, IntelliJ integrates essential tools for databases and version control, streamlining your workflow by keeping everything you need within reach. The Community Edition of IntelliJ is available for free and offers an extensive exploration of its features, though access is restricted to students, BootCamp members, and specific focus groups. For everyone else, the Professional Edition is available at approximately $20 a month and includes full access to IntelliJ's powerful suite of tools.

For these demonstrations, I'm using IntelliJ IDEA, equipped with the Kotlin Notebook plugin and all necessary dependencies. If you’d like to follow along step-by-step, I recommend setting up your environment similarly. Here is a short installation guide.

Android Studio or IntellijIDEA (configured for Android development) installed and working in your machine.

If you are using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) like IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse, you can set environment variables in the configuration settings of your application.

Being somewhat allergic to coding in Java (this is a personal thing, if you like Java then good for you) I decided to try out writing the code using Kotlin from JetBrains instead. I'm already using IntelliJ as I work with Apache Spark using Scala, so the tooling was already there and ready to go for this.

IntelliJ (look for the community edition) on the other hand offered great out-of-box Groovy support including IntelliSence, building, and running features. So, I sticked with it 😊

While inactive blockdiag was small and nice for automatically annotating documentation.

As you can see it hasn't been maintained for a few years.

https://github.com/blockdiag/blockdiag

Graphviz is great because dot file are simple and easy to read and trivial to add to a build chain.

https://graphviz.org/

With complex diagrams, I find good old PlantUML diagrams more useful if not as initially pretty as mermaid. Plus it will output archimate without having to touch that UI

https://plantuml.com/

But really it is horses for courses.

Looking at the mermaid on mobile with a dark theme is pretty painful at least right now as an example of why it is not my preference.

But I am typically not targeting web display.

Use a high-level language like Plant UML, D2, Graphviz which are good for the purpose they are designed for, but not for generic purpose diagramming.

I feel like https://plantuml.com/ gets close to what I want by being able to make diagrams with code, but for system design what I really want is to be able to have diagrams generated directly from the code itself, maybe with some extra comments/annotations that help it along.

Does anything like that exist already?

PlantUML, like Mermaid, is an open source tool that allows users to create diagrams from plain text descriptions. PlantUML is the original ‘diagrams as code’ platform. It has a deep feature set, can be integrated into just about any environment, and can be extended to fit just about any use case. For example, the most useful thing to me about PlantUML is its support for visualizing .JSON files.

New version 3.0 of my PlantUML App for iPad is out with exciting update! 🤩 The new multi-modality feature now lets you transform hand-drawn diagrams into PlantUML scripts with just a pencil ✍🏻 or your fingers 👆. Take a look 👀 to this short on YouTube and download it from App Store to support me 👍🏻.

Someone at work showed me https://plantuml.com/ recently. If you want your diagrams as code . Version controlled etc.. I highly recommend it.

Maybe try PlantUML.

Open-source tool that uses simple textual descriptions to draw beautiful UML diagrams.