Save Time and Energy With UML Diagram Generator Tools Online !

Introduction

During a software architecture report redaction, i was confronted to a major problem : I would generated some UML diagrams as « Use Case », « Class Diagram » and « Activity Diagram » but i didn’t have tools as Microsoft Office Visio or equivalent installed on my laptop. So i searched web tools to generate these diagrams easily.

What i found ?

First website i found was Web Sequence Diagram: [www.websequencediagrams.com][1]
Second website i found was yUML: [yuml.me][2]
Third website i found was KangaModeling: [kangamodeling.org][3]

Why these tools are powerful ?

1. Scriptable

These tools allow to describe what we want with a script language.

Example with Web Sequence Diagram Tool  :

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# Show Action with RoR
Browser->URL Routing : GET
URL Routing->Controller : show Action
Controller -> Model : find ( params[id] )
Model -> Controller : trigger
Controller -> Controller : Lookup Show View
Controller -> View : Render ( Show View, trigger )

View -> Model : getData()
Model -> Trigger (Physical Element) : request() : SNMP / SOAP / XMLRPC / …
Trigger (Physical Element) -> Model : response : XML / JSON / …
Model -> View : data

View->Browser : HTML

Activity diagram image generated :

Example with Web Sequence Diagram Tool  : ****

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[User]-(Show a monitor)
[User]-(Show monitor’s parameters)
[Administrator] - (Manage a monitor)
[Administrator] - (Manage users)
(Manage a monitor)>(Delete a monitor)
(Manage a monitor)>(Update a monitor)
(Manage a monitor)>(Add a monitor)
(Manage users)<(LDAP Active Directory)

Use case diagram image generated :

2. Integration with other services

Both tools integrate an API.

They allow to integrate images in your website with just a GET or POST request.

Example with yUML :

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http://yuml.me/diagram/class/[Customer]->[Billing Address]

Will generate :

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import urllib
import re

def getSequenceDiagram( text, outputFile, style = ‘default’ ):
    request = {}
    request[“message”] = text
    request[“style”] = style
    request[“apiVersion”] = “1”

    url = urllib.urlencode(request)

    f = urllib.urlopen(“http://www.websequencediagrams.com/”, url)
    line = f.readline()
    f.close()

    expr = re.compile(”(\?(img|pdf|png|svg)=[a-zA-Z0-9]+)”)
    m = expr.search(line)

    if m == None:
        print “Invalid response from server.”
        return False

    urllib.urlretrieve(“http://www.websequencediagrams.com/” + m.group(),
            outputFile )
    return True

style = “qsd”
text = “alice->bob: authentication request\nbob–>alice: response”
pngFile = “out.png”

getSequenceDiagram( text, pngFile, style )