Graphical visualization of data models is very essential to get an overview of its complexity and understand the big picture. It is a debatable point regarding how much effort a project can spend in developing graphical visualization for the data model.
There are several graphical visualization technologies available in the market (both open source and commercial), but each of them comes up with their own complexity , this consumes immense effort for the developer to understand them and implement the visualization based on the business case.
PlantUML is an open source technology (built on java) which uses simple textual descriptions to draw beautiful diagrams.
--> Effort for the developer is to only convert the model data into : PlantUML textual description language (which is simple and intuitive), which will be further converted into diagram image (png, svg etc.,)
Based on the business needs if it is required to quickly develop graphical visualization of data it is recommended to use PlantUML and integrate the images in the application.
In this session we will demonstrate:
- Various diagrams PlantUML can generated (e.g.: Sequence diagram, Activity diagram, use case diagram, component diagram etc.,).
- How we used PlantUML for building "EMF meta model explorer visualization" which is used to understand the complex meta models
- Eclipse based Framework which wraps the code for diagram generation and visualization in the diagram view, and provides the possibility to link model elements with the diagram elements using hyperlinks.
Additional Information:
PlantUML (http://plantuml.com/)
- User Guide: http://plantuml.com/guide
EMF meta model explorer with graphical visualization of data :
