geographika

As I previously wrote, one of the ways to get through the task of documenting a project is to turn the documentation process into a coding project. Documentation sometimes seems pointless as the likelihood of anyone other than yourself reading it are low to nil.

To increase the chances pretty pictures always help. If they are also useful then the documentation starts to have real value. Up until now I’ve been using Microsoft’s Visio, but recently I tried out a couple of online tools.

Class Diagrams

The MapServer Mapscript documentation currently uses of diagrams made from ASCII text to illustrate relationships between classes. I’m not sure if these were generated automatically, but the images now appear a little dated. They do  however have the advantage over an image of being able to copy and paste class names.

+-------+ 0..*     1 +-------+
| Class | <--------> | Layer |
+-------+            +-------+

I tried to recreate these diagrams using the online service http://yuml.me/. On the site you enter your model description using a fairly basic syntax. From then on the same diagram can be accessed using different URLs, which are used to control display and formatting options.

The diagram above was created using the syntax below. You can play around with this sample by clicking here.

[Hashtable]1..1->1[Class{bg:yellow}],
[Label ]0..1->1[Class],
[Style]0..*->1[Class],
[Class]0..*->1[Layer{bg:green}]

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