A Beginner’s Guide to PlantUML
The plucky open source plain-text diagramming syntax you never knew you needed
I’ve been making architectural diagrams for well over a decade. Oh, the pain for so little return. While the diagrams I’ve created have helped explain my designs in so many ways, the tools which have been available to create them have been, well, painful. So many bloated software tools for architectural diagrams. So much wasted effort dragging and dropping shapes on grids, attaching connector lines, double-clicking to edit this or that. In the end, the tools themselves were really the problem. They invariably required way too much effort for far too little to show for it but some ugly jpg files and a growing disdain for architectural diagramming suites.
For those of you who have never had to face the awfulness of past ‘enterprise architect’ tools, you are the lucky ones. Those of you who have used the likes of which I speak know only too well the suffering which these kinds of tools engender. There was a spate of abortive attempts from the latter 90s through the early/mid 2000s to create some kind of penultimate architectural diagramming tool, one which would cure all your diagramming ills. I think I tried near-on all of them. It was like drinking cyanide to cure a cold.
