The Occasional Occurence

I stumbled across Web Sequence Diagrams the other day.

It's a web-based diagramming application that uses a simple syntax to generate UML diagrams. No clicking around and positioning little boxes all over the place - just type in text that describes the diagram, and voila, there it is. He even provides a number of styles that you can apply to the diagrams. All in all, very slick.

Here's an example of some code that describes a request to a database backed website.

Client->HTTP Server: GET /foo
HTTP Server-->Database: SQL query
Database-->HTTP Server: Query results
alt resource exists
  HTTP Server->Client: HTTP 200 OK
else not found
  HTTP Server->Client: HTTP 404 Not Found
end

Here is the resulting diagram:

I read his blog a bit and it sounds like he is using Python, PHP and the Cairo graphics library. I wish the source was available, but it is not. He does have an open HTTP API though.

I think this might be an interesting solution to the images-in-docstrings discussion on comp.lang.python the other day, but only for including diagrams, of course.

cw