workload-discovery-on-aws VS GoJS, a JavaScript Library for HTML Diagrams

Workload Discovery on AWS has recently released a new version - would that work for you?

It's interpreted line-by-line so that each line represents one state of the diagram. There are commands to delete nodes: when I delete a node I just remove it from its parent but leave it in the top-level state. That has the neat effect that if I re-add it, I get the node with all its descendents and connections restored in one step, which I can use to pre-diagram things I talk about often.

After calculating the drawing state by applying all the commands from the start to the current selection, the next step is to limit this to the visible pieces. I make a copy of the drawing state, starting from the currently zoomed node and following all children. Then I add all connections, if all the 'to' ends of the connections are visible.

Next, I do layout. Starting with the visible tree, annotate all nodes with positions of the box (if any), the icon, and the label. The diagrams I'm drawing are similar to those produced by AWS Perspective: https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/implementations/aws-perspec... , so if a node has no children I draw it as a large icon with a label below, if it has children, it is a box with a small icon to the top left, a centred label at the top. Each node can choose one of a small number of layouts that I can do automatically with just a list of children: 'ring' (a circle of nodes), 'row', 'column', or 'snake' (the default: alternate rtl-ltr rows to evenly fill the space; this will be a grid if that fits or could end up like 4-3-4-3 if it doesn't). In ring & snake, boxes are always 4:3; in row and column they are stretched to fit.

Next, I do animation. I keep around the previous layed-out state, and use window.requestAnimationFrame to calculate the position of boxes between the start and end state. A box that is in both start and end states is moved, if it is only in start or end I fade it in or out as need be. This lets me animate between _any_ two states of the drawing, so I can talk about one bit of the diagram, then jump back and forth by clicking in the command window, and it smoothly animates between them. I found animating for just 0.5s worked best for interactivity; it's nice to see a slower move but it feels laggy when typing.

I calculate arrow positions after calculating the final position of boxes and icons. I chose to use circular arcs, because you will never get an awkward situation where an arc lies directly along the edge of a box; straight things are always boxes, curvy things are always arrows. SVG wants two endpoints and a centre to draw these. So, I start with an arc between the centres of the two boxes, choose a radius twice as long as the distance between these points; then I calculate the intersection of the arc with the boxes, and use those two intersection points as the start/end of the arc. (this isn't that difficult, the formula for the arc is in the svg spec, and it's checking 4 straight lines, choose the intersection point closest to the other box). Like the boxes, the arrows fade in and out if they are not needed in one of the start or end states.

All of this then just replaces the content of the svg. It's surprisingly smooth.

One last detail is icons. I'm using the icons from mingrammer (https://github.com/mingrammer/diagrams/tree/master/resources), which gives me about 1600(!). Finding an icon _while you type_ is awkward and initially I had to drop to the shell to find the file I was going to refer to. I tried giving the drawing tool a mode that would let me visually pick the icon, but 1600 is too many. So I changed it to use a fuzzy search to find an appropriate icon: it looks for the icon where the sequence of characters appear in the shortest substring of the icon path: eg for 'ec2' it constructs the regex `.(e.?c.*?2)`, scoring the matching substring 'ec2' better than 'elastic2', and the shorter containing string 'aws/compute/ec2' better than eg 'aws/compute/ec2-rounded'. (I have a further round of preferences so that the top level aws iconset is preferred to eg the ibm one, which has terrible icons). This gives you an icon for almost anything you type, and encourages a more playful approach to picking the icon than the exact-match approach.

There's a bit more to it, I also accept some markdown which fades from the diagram to slides with bullet points, then back to the diagram if the current command is a diagramming command. But the description above is most of it. I could probably have done this better with eg d3 to do the drawing but I am not a front end developer at all and the whole thing was more of a hack over a couple of weekends. I should clean it up a bit, but it works.

I serve up pre-prepared pages with this js attached from github pages, I can walk through eg the flow of data clicking the down arrow to change the selection which causes it to animate to the next state which has the next arrow... and so on.

AWS has a solution called AWS Perspective that will do exactly this. The solution itself is free and open source, you only pay for the resources it creates. You can also export the diagrams to draw.io if you want to edit them manually. Also, it will show you how much your solution(s) and each of its components is costing you.

Check out - https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/implementations/aws-perspective/

Have spent six figures yearly on ads, mostly for reach for the developer-focused diagram library GoJS (https://gojs.net)

> Each experiment will need ~$500 and 2 weeks

I would add a zero if you want serious data. I would also double the timescale. $5,000 over 4 weeks

I second the uselessness of Google Display, it might look like conversions numbers are good but they are 100% too good to be true. As soon as you look into them you find the sources are things like "ad from HappyFunBabyTime Android app". You have to ruthlessly prune daily for months to get anything real, and even then I'm skeptical of value. For a developer tool with very strict conversion metrics!

But I disagree on Google Search:

> Good for conversion, bad for awareness.

Before we were popular it was excellent for awareness. Post popularity its much more arguable.

Creating the Halogen components would be simple enough if one takes inspiration from gojs-react. The issue is that there are no PureScript bindings for the GoJS types themselves, but GoJS does provide .ts.d declarations, which means I could use purescript-read-dts, but that library's maturity/usability seems somewhat ambiguous, according to an author's post from 3 years ago.

used goJS in one project and konva in another

I built GoJS, which is one of the most popular commercial JS diagramming libraries: https://gojs.net

I built carefulwords, a very fast thesaurus and quote site for inspiration, used by... tens of people a day. Eg: https://carefulwords.com/gift https://carefulwords.com/solitude

I mostly made it for myself, me and my wife use it all the time. I am slowly editing down the thesaurus to managable size.

I built a 12x16 "Goose Palace" barn out of local pine timbers, which taught me timber framing, and taught my tiny baby who turned 2 years old while doing it that this is just the kind of thing that people normally do, build barns in their driveway. Some context: https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/the-goose-palace

Some photos of building it with the baby: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1584169368203956225

I designed my house, and have been writing extensively about that. Maybe this is the most impactful, since photos of it are all over Pinterest and other sites, now. The first post on that: https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/designing-a-new-old-home-...

I am not sure what is most impactful. Maybe ultimately it is building my family.

I made a pull request for GoJS (https://gojs.net)

I have been building this canvas-based graphing library since 2011, and it contains a good number of features around customization and interactivity that are not found in other libraries. It is commercial for non-academic use however.

in one project we use konva, in another we used gojs. Any of them or some other library needs some training and introduce own limitations but it still way way way better than handing all the coordinates, calculations, routing etc on your own.

I am really surprised by this guy's opinion. I make GoJS (https://gojs.net/), a diagramming library written in TypeScript. The project began in 2011 and we converted it to TS in 2018. It's been a huge plus. The sole downside was the initial time it took during conversion, but even in doing so we caught bugs with incorrect input types, documentation mistakes, etc.

On our end, it enforces type safety better than the Google Closure Compiler. There has scarcely been a problem with type complexity that was not ultimately our fault. Just a couple minor things that TS amended later. For that matter the TS experience has only gotten better, generally.

On our users end, we can now give them a .d.ts file that's much richer and easier for us to produce to aid their autocompletion. And we can use that .d.ts file to ensure that all the methods we intended to expose/minify are getting exposed. The advantages with the .d.ts and documentation make it feel almost essential to me for library developers to consider TS.

TypeScript has only made debugging easier, much easier since it catches errors at time of typing unlike the closure compiler. The sole exception is that debugging is a bit slower since I have to transpile instead of just refreshing the browser. But I have tsc set to compile a relatively unminified version of the JS. But if the slowness gets to me, I can just edit the JS output until I solve the issue, and then carry those edits over to the TS. This has never felt like a problem, though maybe his library is significantly more complicated.

Feel free to ask me anything if you have questions about library design + TS.

GoJS might work for you: https://gojs.net

Although the focus of the library is interactivity and not setting up sequences of animation, but that is possible too.

My livelihood has been primarily building a Canvas diagramming library since 2010 (https://gojs.net), if anyone has any questions about 2D Canvas use in the real-world I'd be happy to answer them.

roundRect is great. Though you don't need 4 arcTo in order to make a rounded rect, you can use bezier instead (we do). Their example is also 1% amusing because they set the `fillStyle` but then call `stroke` (and not `fill`). I'll have to do some performance comparisons, since that's the operative thing for my use case (and any library author).

text modifiers are very welcome. It's crazy how annoying measuring still is, especially if you want thinks to look perfectly consistent across browsers. Though the chrome dominance is making things easier in one way, I guess.

context.reset is kinda funny. Most high-performance canvas apps will never want to use it. For that matter you want to set all properties as little as possible, especially setting things like context.font, which are slow even if you're setting it to the same value. (Or it was, I haven't tested that in several years).

I'm sure most users know this by now, but generally for performance the fewer calls you make to the canvas and the context, the beter. This is even true of transforms: It's faster to make your own Matrix class, do all your own matrix translation, rotation, multiplication, etc, and then make a single call to `context.setTransform`, than it is to call the other context methods.

I have some problem with gojs(https://gojs.net/),