

Emacs Major Mode for Sequence Diagrams - signa11
https://github.com/josteink/wsd-mode

======
teddyh
This would be more accurately titled “ _Emacs Major Mode for Web Service for
creating Sequence Diagrams_ ”, since all it does is be a client for
www.websequencediagrams.com and is completely dependent on that Software-as-a-
Service.

~~~
josteink
Author here. This is completely correct. But my main motivation for creating
this was getting something working in a easy and portable fashion.

Basically I wanted to have something I could share with my colleagues and
which could be accepted as "documentation" if checked into source-control. For
that using a dialect of diagram-generators which nobody else can get working
isn't going to cut it. Those solutions are hardly "out of the box"-friendly,
and even less so portable.

This package relies 100% on websequencediagrams.com, and for that it is
restricted by whatever the website supports.

But because of that it's also 100% portable and should work out of the box on
any machine, without any other prerequisites. And I think that is quite nice.

I just thought it was useful and wanted to share. If my needs are aligned
differently than yours I'm not going to take offence :)

~~~
nodivbyzero
Well done. Do you accept feature requests?

~~~
josteink
This isn't a full time project for me, but just something to scratch an itch:
writing out big UML processes in a HTML textarea isn't my idea of an ideal
editing process.

It's hard to promise anything up front, but if you register an issue on the
github issue-tracker I can at least consider it.

I may like the idea and take on the challenge or I may decide that for me it
doesn't seem worth it. But I do also accept pull requests :)

------
spain
The two screenshots really do a great job of explaining what it is.

~~~
e40
Maybe. The pretty generated picture, how is it generated? It references
"www.websequencediagrams.com" but when I go there I get a 500 error.

Aside from the pretty pictures it's pretty devoid of information.

~~~
pkaye
I think they submit the sequence description file to that website and capture
the returned image.

~~~
josteink
Author here. I used the api as provided by the site author. Details here:

[http://www.websequencediagrams.com/embedding.html](http://www.websequencediagrams.com/embedding.html)

~~~
e40
Very cool. Thanks.

------
mkramlich
I love the DSL for sequence diagrams the most. I've always wanted a structured
text notation for architectural concepts (databases, queues, load balancing,
failover, etc) as well as more atomic (non-text) graphical symbols for each.
UML specifies a symbol for database, for example, but not for most of those
other things. Perhaps I should get serious about scratching this itch.

------
pmonson711
It might be interesting to update this to use
[http://www.mcternan.me.uk/mscgen/](http://www.mcternan.me.uk/mscgen/) or the
enhanced [http://sourceforge.net/projects/msc-
generator/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/msc-generator/) to remove the
websequencediagrams.com dependency. I know others have suggested planetuml,
but I've always liked the msc-gen stuff for sequence diagrams, a bit more.

------
maksg
I used graphviz dot program to create [https://github.com/maksle/xslt-
dependencies](https://github.com/maksle/xslt-dependencies) (xslt 1.0
dependency viewer) for EMACS. I was about to look into this and drop using dot
but this also relies on an external service. Nothing wrong with this or dot
though, I just thought it would be cool to be entirely self contained in
EMACS. It was surprisingly easy to create a nice node graph with dot though.

