2014/09/28

Sequence Diagramming Tool Thingumy-bob

I've used a variety of tools to produce sequence diagrams over the years, many of them very poor, some of them satisfactory, none of them what you'd call "good". Usually because they force you to do battle with a plastic mouse for several hours to make anything other than the simplest of interactions come to life.

However, forced to ditch my old favourites (Rational Rose and Rational Software Architect) in favour of open-source alternatives (Papyrus), has not been as fruitful as I'd have liked. Papyrus does a good job but is just as bad as all the commercial variants at drawing sequence diagrams - resulting in micro mouse movements to get just the right connection in just the right position. I don't get it, sequence diagrams are more like code than any other diagram and it's easier to write them than it is to draw them... so with this in mind; and having tried websequencediagrams which is cool but doesn't seem to handle life-lines properly (and I'm not paying for the commercial version to find out), I knocked up my own means in a couple of lonely evenings just to see how bad it is...

Turns out a reasonable approximation isn't too hard and since I can make it do what I want to do with (relative) ease in the browser, so be it. Doesn't do a lot, but then I don't want it to do much. Anyway, try it out if you get some time at The Mighty Stellarmap.com sequence diagraming tool thingy... hummm...

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