Women in Technology

Article:		An Introduction to GraphViz and dot
Subject:		Autodia and other software
Date:		2004-05-11 05:24:15
From:		teejay
Michele, You seem to have forgotten about or overlooked Autodia and other free software that already does this. Perl has several GraphViz modules for diagramming databases, classes, etc There are also dozens of perl (and other) scripts to generate diagrams from sql, etc in anything from dot to dia. ..and of course there is Autodia which has been able to draw class diagrams (in dot, dia and other forms) from python, perl, php, c++, Java, SQL and other sources for quite some time. NB I am the author of AutoDia and maintainer of a graphviz module. But if Michele can plug python warez, I'll plug perl stuff ;)

Showing messages 1 through 3 of 3.

• Autodia and other software
  2004-05-11 06:22:38  michelesimionato [View]
  
  
  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.
• 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.