GRAPHVIZ SEQUENCE DIAGRAM MANUAL

On the other hand, among the many functionalities, PlantUML's JSON is unusually good looking out of the box, and if one required the diagram it outputs, it's a great feature, because it requires no syntax knowledge.īoth PlantUML and Mermaid mostly produce (Mermaid more) ugly-looking diagrams (dated, to say the least). Mermaid is supported by Github, which may be a necessary requirement for some. Mermaid is quite basic it lacks functionalities that for me were necessary for example, direct connection between attributes of different classes.Īll in all, PlantUML seems superior to Mermaid, at no cost (both languages are relatively simple to learn). I've been using PlantUML and Mermaid for my own diagrams.

If there's no way of pruning them beforehand, or perhaps grouping, aggregating or clustering (in a way that makes sense to the viewer, not necessarily only structurally), then it can be hard to get good result. Then there's generally the problem of larger graphs, which tend to devolve into a tangled mess and hairballs, simply because they often tend to be well-connected. We see this disconnect fairly often in our own customer support, but I haven't really found a good way of putting an explanation in writing. To add to that, most layout algorithms prioritize optimizing certain criteria, while other parts of the visualization emerge from that and if the human viewer chooses a layout algorithm because of one of the latter properties, they are often surprised that the result doesn't look like they envisioned (because, hey, the algorithm optimized something entirely different). Laying out larger graphs is tricky, often because the size simply stands in the way of generating anything that's useful to the viewer.

GRAPHVIZ SEQUENCE DIAGRAM MANUAL

In the reverse direction, our work more in terms of quickly configurable global dataviz data bindings ('using the UI or API, bind each event's score to a hot-and-cold coloring palette and use a warning icon on all type=alert events'), but we have a ways to go to support the more manual artisinal effects of diagramming tools like Figma, where each element might have a super fancy & unique border style. Ex: We're the easiest graph tool for jupyter/databricks/streamlit etc teams who use dataframes, and I can imagine those tools learning from us here. The overlap is real however, so a lot of room for teams to learn. Using Graphistry to do a quick markdown of how a 4 node cluster might work is a bit like driving a tank to pick up some milk :) Teams go to us more for gnarly investigation & splunking tasks that need a visual power tool, like looking at alert logs or big systems, so we optimize for making that scale interactive & easy. 100% agreement, spot on observations! Indeed, we end up referring folks to cool diagramming tools all the time at Graphistry as d2/mermaid/ are well-optimized for quick & beautiful diagram presentation tasks on manageably sized & fairly static datasets.

Graphviz sequence diagram