PlantUML

Here's a UML diagrammer driven by DSLs. Ran across it linked from the description of another project by its author that used it to document his class diagram. Slick!

Flowchart.js

Well, this is all kinds of attractive. A declarative language that is converted into flowcharts. You just can't beat that.

yEd diagrammer

Wow. This is what a fantastic tool looks like. yEd basically looks like magic. But if you really want magic, look at the gallery.

GraphVizFiddle

Online diagramming and code display. Cool!

Obesity system influence map

I'm not sure what this really is - a kind of mind map of the interacting concepts and behavior patterns in the mind that influence obesity, more or less. I find it fascinating both from a technical standpoint and for the fact that it's an impressive map in and of itself.

Filed under mental models and diagramming...

Shell explainer

This is utterly fantastic! Give it a shell command of arbitrary complexity and it will draw a nifty chart-slash-diagram with explanatory text for it. I love this.

Decl 2.0 syntax parser

I've been working on a lot of thoughts about the Decl reboot lately, including a ground-up rethinking of the basic way of handling syntax, and I've come to some conclusions.

Indentation is a misleading way of thinking about this. Indentation is just an indication of the two-dimensionality of text. Especially if we look at Markdown and its friends and relatives, we really have to realize that at least the block elements are there to exploit that two-dimensionality, to arrange information vertically as well as horizontally to present and shape information.

In fact, I'm getting a lot closer to just saying that Decl syntax and Markdown are sort of the same thing. And so I want to come up with a parsing language for two-dimensional text that is not a grammar built for one-dimensional sentences. Or at least is only partly a one-dimensional grammar.

Along the way, I hope to start looking at some naturally two-dimensional text items:

• Diagrams
• Musical scores
• Other timing diagrams
• Workflow charts, GANNT charts, etc.
• Page layouts and screen layouts for forms, buttons, etc.

And all that could be directly supported by at least part of the parser. Using indentation and block rules, we can do a "terraced scan", as it were, identifying blocks first and then drilling into them to identify more details.

The combination of Markdown with the Decl parser and interpreter, moreover, gives me a very natural way to implement literate programming tools in a way that finally makes sense to me.

I think this is going to be very fruitful.

Diagramming again

I think I may have posted draw.io before, by jgraph as a free demonstrator for their non-free JavaScript diagramming drop-in. The HNN thread, as usual, includes a few alternatives, none of which seem really to measure up. One commenter is using jgraph's code as part of his very cool InsightMaker tool, which uses the diagrammer to build a system, then runs simulations on that system to provide numerical graphs. (Now that is cool.)

OpenCV

http://opencv.org/ is the open-source computer vision library I keep hearing about. There's currently a Kickstarter up for using it to interpret hand drawings of a mobile UI and generate the UI skeleton, which begs the question - couldn't I use it for sketches and concept maps?

I don't see why not!

Diagramming link dump

I got a few diagramming links piling up.

• JS sequence diagrams, very nice look, parses a sequence diagram description language.
• Chart.js looks neat.
• A guy that blogs about UML, talking about different modes of use for it, which I find pretty enlightening.  In case you're wondering, I favor "UML as programming language".
• A UML sharing service (UMLbin).  Neat idea.  But the only download option is a PNG - no source.  So that's disappointing.
• And Visualizing Social Structures, a historical retrospective.

Business process diagramming/definition languages

Just some leads:

• BPMN is an open notation format.
• Some flowchart examples.
• Gliffy does BPMN, apparently, as a Web service - probably easier to use it than rolling my own.

jsPlumb

Graphing UI library jsPlumb - very nice.  Too cartoony for my taste, but I'm sure it's all configurable.  The point is all the heavy lifting's already done.

Time for a link dump

I've been sick, and the interesting tabs are piling up in my browser.  The problem is that the browser in question is on my 7-year-old XP laptop, and frankly, its CPU fan is starting to bug me.  So before I go to bed, link dump time!

• jQuery file upload demo.  OK, I know, but I'm a sucker for this stuff.
• Zac Stewart weighs in with an interesting proposal to use the HTTP OPTIONS verb for API self-description.
• Mojolicious boilerplate.  You had me at "boilerplate".
• Building world-class ML systems, an article at the O'Reilly Radar that I haven't even had time to read.  By the way, the complaints about NLP systems usually failing when normal mortals try to use them (OK, maybe I'm slanting that a little in paraphrase) is because current NLP systems aren't actually intelligent, but people don't have the mental tools to understand that.
• wkhtmltopdf - heck of a name for a tool that uses WebKit to render an HTML page to PDF.
• Diagram.ly - I'm pretty sure I've linked them before.  But still.  Here they are again.
• First in a series listing the tools for modern Web development.
• Nice post mortem on a virus infiltration.  I'm a sucker for that stuff, too.
• My cousin Erin's old blog has a post on responsive prototyping that's pretty slick.
• (See how I name-dropped there, but only for the really hip?  That's just how I roll.)
• Clearly.pl, a programmable structured text editor in Javascript. [github]
• generic-ci, a generic continuous integration tool that doesn't pull in all of Java.
• Cheap hosting page.

Diagramming again

Along with Octave, I've been thinking that presentation of systems might benefit from a diagramming language. Not that this is a new thing for me; it recurs with tiresome periodicity, actually.

But this is its first recurrence since I have a pseudocode parser at the ready.

So I've been looking at different diagramming systems for inspiration. I'm not even primarily interested in a diagram editor - just a display based on a structural language. Like graphviz, really. I could see diagrams being editable later, and I could certainly see them being clickable links in a system description or the like, but right now my primary focus is typesetting of readable documents, I think.

This post has been pretty thin in terms of doing anything except establishing a point of interest, hasn't it?

Various diagramming things

Oooh, started with inubit, which is closed-source but has features that make my brain melt. This. I need to just scan down the menu on the left.

Then there's Pic2Plot-gui, at Gitorious, a Qt-based UI for generating PIC. For which latter, see.

Also: GraphViz.