Article:		An Introduction to GraphViz and dot
Subject:		Autodia and other software
Date:		2004-05-11 06:22:38
From:		michelesimionato
Response to: Autodia and other software
There are *lots* of applications using GraphViz. I couldn't list them all, so I just put a link to GraphViz home-page (which list AutoDia, BTW). Furthermore I said "Bindings exist for many programming languages—including Java, Perl, and Python. A more lightweight alternative is just to generate the dot code from your preferred language." then I gave an example in Python, essentially because it is a readable language even for readers that do not know it. The message I wanted to pass was that for small projects, it maybe faster to generate 'dot' code by hand with your preferred language than to use an existing tool.

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• fair point apart from class diagrams
  2004-05-11 06:56:50  teejay [View]
  
  
  dot is very fast to generate by small scripts or by hand, and it is a good introduction.
  

  
  Python's strongest point is that its a good teaching language (ever tried porting or groking java examples with the dozens of lines creating tiny objects that are used as arguments to a method of another small object to get yet more tiny objects .. uurgh, yes Dr Dobbs I'm talking about you)
  

  
  No point reinventing the wheel with class diagrams though.

• yes, but using a tool is usually quicker
  2004-05-11 06:52:30  teejay [View]
  
  
  ..especially when there is a tool *cough* autodia *cough* that already does it for you, that was in fact designed to solve this problem several years ago.
  

  
  perl -MCPAN -e 'install Autodia'
  
  autodia.pl -d path/to/files -l python -o myclasses.png -Z
  

  
  is pretty quick.
  

  
  Having said that, yes, dot is very programmable and rapid to code to. Graphviz is very cool, and knocking off a quick script to handle edge-cases is quite satisfying but there is no point re-inventing the wheel.