UML diagramming without the drawing

Posted by thaberkern on May 03 2009 | General

Not a symfony related blog entry but I ran into this tool yesterday and I pretty like it. So I want to share my finding with you. Maybe you know it: You are working on some documentation in your favorit wiki (trac, redmine…) and you like to add some UML diagramm fragments to it. Switching to a vector drawing or UML-Tool, creating the diagram, saving it as a bitmap graphic, uploading it to the wiki and linking it in the wiki-markup… *phew* A lot of work for a simple task.

It can be done easier :-) Just use yUML for creating the UML fragments. The free service use a different, more declarative, approach.You can add UML via image tags to your blog or wiki.

For example:<img src=”http://yuml.me/diagram/class/[Order]->[Position]”>” /> results in

Of course you can create more complex diagrams like this one (from the yUML documentation).

<img src=”http://yuml.me/diagram/class/[Customer]<>1-orders 0..*>[Order], [Order]++*-*>[LineItem], [Order]-1>[DeliveryMethod], [Order]*-*>[Product], [Category]<->[Product], [DeliveryMethod]^[National], [DeliveryMethod]^[International]”/>

It is surprising, what can be done with this solution

  • Aggregation
  • Relations
  • Composition
  • Inheritance
  • Cardinality
  • Labels
  • Classes with methods and properties

All included.  Beside class diagrams Use cases can created also.

Book Mark it->del.icio.us | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Facebook | Technorati | Google | StumbleUpon | Windows Live | Tailrank | Furl | Netscape | Yahoo | BlinkList

6 comments for now

6 Responses to “UML diagramming without the drawing”

  1. If you liked this tool you may be interested also in checking other similar tools I list here: http://modeling-languages.com/blog/content/textual-notationslanguages-define-uml-models-list-tools

    03 May 2009 at 17:46

  2. Hi,

    thanks for the link. I have known TextUML but none of the other :-)

    Timo

    03 May 2009 at 18:36

  3. Duane Gran

    Another approach out of the box is the sfPropelGraphviz plug in:

    http://trac.symfony-project.org/wiki/sfPropelGraphviz

    There is also one for doctrine.

    03 May 2009 at 18:41

  4. Rubino

    That’s pretty cool.
    Just need a generator that parses the schema yml now :)

    03 May 2009 at 21:38

  5. Nice review Timo, thanks for the positive feedback :)

    I loved your phrase “UML fragments” for describing what yUML is about. Might use that if you don’t mind!

    04 May 2009 at 13:47

  6. Alex Stoneham

    I am drooling for Rubinos comment, You give the world something great and they want more hey ;-) Great work yUML
    Great work Symfony Core team, I am a happy individual knowing I have chosen a winning strat

    15 May 2009 at 23:34

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply