plantuml VS d2

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.

Seems like a considerable upgrade from PlanUML (https://plantuml.com/ - which is amazing, but sometimes you just can't seem to be able to align the stuff the way you want too).

plantuml is amongst the best there is. kroki.io has a sandbox for it mermaid.js can do it in notion, it works as well as any other mermaid. dbvisualizer is fantastic if you have an existing schema in a db instance. you may need the trial license to render the diagrams

PlantUML ima podsku za mnogo vise dijagrama - https://plantuml.com/ (bar za sada).

I mean, I know about PlantUML where you can write code that will generate cool diagrams and it's feels like one of solutions\implementations but not the right one. What actual way people in huge companies create UML diagrams for their projects? I can't find any software or language syntax, even guides on Youtube about UML is just hours of talking about all sorts of UML diagrams without ever mentioning any software or syntax or actual way to create them.

While not embedded in markdown, I like d2 [1]. I can use it with org-babel to embed and view the diagrams on emacs. After using graphviz for years, the visual output seems more polished to me. With that said, I want to give pikchr a try.

[1]:https://d2lang.com/

In the next post I'll deep-dive into the D2 language which also has a huge set of features. Stay tuned.

That site is created by the maintainers of D2[1], so it might be biased, but I still think D2 has the friendliest syntax of the bunch, including nomnoml.

[1]: https://d2lang.com/

I've been using https://structurizr.com/ to automatically generate C4 diagrams from a model (rather than drawing them by hand). It works well with the approach for written documentation as proposed in https://arc42.org/. It's very easy to embed a C4 diagram into a markdown document.

The result is a set of documents and diagrams under version control that can be rendered using the structurizr documentation server (for interactive diagrams and indexed search).

I also use https://d2lang.com/ for declarative diagrams in addition to C4, e.g., sequence diagrams and https://adr.github.io/ for architectural decision records. These are also well integrated into structurizr.