https://real-world-plantuml.com/
which appears to be harvested from GitHub searches: https://github.com/yfuruyama/real-world-plantuml/blob/master...
Personally, I'm a huge fan of the simplicity and whenever I present such a diagram to teams or execs, I break the ice by warning them it'll be "ugly" or "let's go back to 1995 for a sec" :) More importantly, the focus remains strictly on the content because of the basic design.
The code example reminds me of Latex: https://crashedmind.github.io/PlantUMLHitchhikersGuide/Netwo...
More recently it has utilised its underlying graphviz to create a more general 'graphviz on steroids' diagramming tool (referred to as the PlantUML standard library).
The original UML diagrams can be styled to look modern, but normally are shown in a default slightly old-fashioned and uninspiring visual style. Such a shame if that's your impression.
As mdaniel posted, just a refresh of the colour scheme can modernise the look of UML diagrams
https://real-world-plantuml.com/umls/4831648155697152
The second part covered by this hitchhikers guide shows a modern take on visualising component relationships.
Both parts allow visualisation as code, but otherwise have different purposes.
I wish we'd see more UML examples in a modern style.
(I'd also recommend MarkDeep for documentation. Includes these + markdown, math, doxygen integration and more)
The only thing that is going on my nerves sometimes is that you can't preciselly say position of elements and being happy with how concrete, albeit more complex diagram draws, is somewhat trial and error (you change direction, change arrow length here and there, change element order etc) but eventually you will make it likeable.
Other thing is that syntax differs a lot between diagrams and I always need to check out manual, no matter how much I use it, it just doesn't stick for me. Thankfully, this is all very easy to do.
For those on Windows, I created chocolatey package [1] that installs all dependencies along with PDF manual and you can have it on your CI or local server as simply as `cinst plantuml`. There is also vscode and mkdocs plugins that are great so you can just insert plantuml diagram strait into markdown between other documentation (alternative is to prerender images which I also did in the past, and is very fast as plantuml regenerates only changed stuff). If you need mkdocs bundled with all this and other nice stuff, check out mm-docs [2].
I must honestly say that this is one of the best FOSS projects I encountered and that it definitelly needs more recognition and support.
[1]: https://github.com/majkinetor/au-packages/tree/master/plantu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language
Not being flippant, that's the difference. graphviz/dot is general-purpose and can be configured to produce UML-like diagrams, but that's labor intensive.
PlantUML takes text and produces UML diagrams from it. It's configurable... as long as you want UML. If you want something else, reach for graphviz.
In my own work, I use dot/graphviz for diagramming abstract syntax trees, while I've used PlantUML a couple times to diagram the layout of structs and to map the high-level relationships between modules in large software projects.
org-mode does a very nice job of integrating both of those formats into documents, fyi.
... as long as you want UML diagrams.
It can't save out valid UML class definitions to a file.
Plant UML uses graphviz as a library to generate a variety of component diagrams.
Am asking because there are lots of programming illiterate colleagues. By encoding the business rules into drawing rules, one could potentially delegate the business logic writing part to non-coding staff
This was mainly promoted and developed by the creators of UML and has strong ties to it. That was UML's vision after all, a visual diagram language that unambiguously captures the essense of a program.
The Eclipse Modeling Framework is a framework that implements this approach.
I think MDE was up and coming around the end of the 2000s. As far as I know it didn't really go anywhere.
[1] https://manpages.debian.org/testing/graphviz/gvpr.1.en.html
