What is Reddit's opinion of PlantUML?

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Try PlantUML --> http://plantuml.sourceforge.net/

Pretty simple text-based UML diagrams... its really really easy and fast to type in anything you can think, and it should be pretty trivial to automate it for PHP...

An example:

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Bob->Alice : hello

Translates to: http://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/png/SyfFKj2rKt3CoKnELR1Io4ZDoSa70000

Occasionally.

Sometimes a quick UML diagram is the better tool than natural language, pseudocode, or some picture with boxes when you want to document or communicate something. Often the diagrams are done when trying to understand a process or subsystem in existing code.

We only use class, instance, sequence and deployment diagrams. Class being the most common and sequence and deployment diagrams being the least common. I have seen some use case diagrams used but they never seemed to communicate anything which could be done better using text.

If you want to make UML diagrams then I recommend PlantUML ( http://plantuml.sourceforge.net/ ). Text descriptions go in and nice diagrams come out. It is fast and lightweight to use and doesn't take much more effort than making notes in a text file once you learn the simple (ASCII art style) syntax.

PlantUML is awesome if you want to be able to crank out diagrams quickly.

Its integration with various tools like trac has made it a huge time saver for me when doing design documents.

Source - save it in a folder, download and run PlantUML and point it to that folder. The image will be updated as you save edits.

Make sure PlantUML is running with the -tsvg switch (make a shortcut) or the thing will be writing a PNG as a file with .svg extension and most browsers aren't smart enough to realize.

Source, using PlantUML and GraphViz.

• The labels on the arrow are the amount of scrap metal you need to add for the crafting recipe.
• When two arrows enter the same item, you need both items for the crafting to occur (the scrap count is repeated on each arrow).
• Multiple arrows between the same two items mean you need more than one to craft. (Yes, that's eight arrows between the Jarate and the Solemn Vow.)

By "7 classes" I mean GraphViz has arranged each item on one of seven columns such that you never need an item from a column to craft another to its left. This gives a non-total ordering of 'crafting worth' for each item. (That's completely distinct from any ordering of in-game usefulness of each item, given how e.g. the Axtinguisher would be 'class 1' and the Mantreads 'class 5'.)