

Show HN: quickly share UML diagrams - trigras
http://app.umlbin.com/index.a

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TallboyOne
Sorry but I literally lost it right when I opened it and saw this

oh my god im literally in tears. This is the best thing ever right when I wake
up.

I'm sorry people are abusing your hard work though, I know thats a bummer. :(

[http://app.umlbin.com/view.a?show=8a78d3b23d8d5a99013d8d62ff...](http://app.umlbin.com/view.a?show=8a78d3b23d8d5a99013d8d62ff8a0006)

[http://app.umlbin.com/view.a?show=8a78d3b23d8d5a99013d8d6588...](http://app.umlbin.com/view.a?show=8a78d3b23d8d5a99013d8d6588b5000c)

[http://app.umlbin.com/view.a?show=8a78d3b23d8d5a99013d8d70a1...](http://app.umlbin.com/view.a?show=8a78d3b23d8d5a99013d8d70a15a0014)

~~~
znowi
I find these rather funny and well carried out.

What greeted me, however, when I opened the site is this:

[http://app.umlbin.com/view.a?show=8a78d3b23d8d5a99013d8d698e...](http://app.umlbin.com/view.a?show=8a78d3b23d8d5a99013d8d698e43000e)

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MrQuincle
Perhaps some more attention need to be paid to keyboard people. :-) Just Ctrl
and arrow to move things around e.g. and selection tools would be good.
Personally though, I w'd like to actually generate a diagram like that without
drawing anything, just a few lines of code, and preferably generated bottom-up
from the code base itself, instead of concocted by some person who actually
doesn't know how the system works, but that's my opinion on use cases in UML.
:-)

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stblack
So people still use UML?

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trigras
Strangely it is not dead. Do not know how widely it is used. From other hand
what are other good standardized options to share/document software structure
and behavior?

~~~
lukeschlather
.png and .markdown ?

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xk_id
Even my rather trivial undergraduate UML project required very advanced
options, and the only software that fully satisfied my needs was astah
professional. I struggled a lot with browser-based UML tools, always to come
across a feature I needed but wasn't supported. It was very frustrating,
because I had to restart work on several platform, until I gave up and started
using astah.

For this reason, I personally avoid web-based UML tools ever since. But, there
might be reasonable use cases for them.

~~~
dmgrow
Interesting to hear. Have you tried Lucidchart - <http://www.lucidchart.com>.
We turn around improvements very quickly and I'd be interested to hear if it
meets your needs, and if not, what we're currently missing for you. You can
reach me at support [at] ...

And if you're still a student, we give free upgrades to Pro accounts so we'd
be happy to hook you up.

~~~
xk_id
Thanks. Actually, my university (UCL) was oferred access to Lucidchart for its
students for that project that we did. So it was one of the web-based tools I
tried. Looking over the paper I wrote, it seems I actually did happily use it
for the domain model, the use case diagram and an early version of the class
diagram. However, I think for the sequence diagrams I found it a bit clumsy
(for example regarding activation boxes) and eventually gave up.

I should note that I think most (probably almost all) of my classmates also
happily used Lucidchart, as it was recommended by the lecturer too. But I was
a bit overzealous and preferred the more rigorous system of astah, like
keeping track of the methods you add to each class and the stricter visual
organisation of elements.

As for particular examples of UML elements that I wish lucidchart had, I can't
really remember, unfortunately.

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davidjgraph
Nice simple idea. Where are the diagrams stored? What measures are taken to
avoid them being lost?

I could work out most of the interactions. I suspect people will struggle with
connecting two vertices with an edge. You need some kind of visual indication
that the creation of an edge has started. Maybe highlight the start vertex and
preferably show a preview of the edge after you move around after having
clicked on the source vertex.

~~~
trigras
Diagrams are stored in database. Did not get about "lost diagrams"? Why should
they be lost? Generally agree there still are places for polishing. The idea
was to create app that can just do it's job , to see if UML is still used at
all (as stblack also asked) and then polish it according to the feedaback.

Thanks.

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mchaver
Honest question, in what sort of situations is using UML diagrams beneficial?
I have only used them in school, but never professionally. The most immediate
use case I can think of is API, documentation for large code, etc., but lots
of bad buzzwords pop into my head when I hear UML like huge Java programs and
over management. That's probably not fair. Anyway, it's a nice looking
project. Keep up the good work!

~~~
Someone
It helps me designing software and communicate the design to others. I find
'claying' with a design on the whiteboard both easier and faster than doing
that in code.

The 'UML is useless; read the code' meme, IMO, is like the 'XML is overly
complex' one. Both technologies can and have been overhyped and overused, but
that does not mean all their use is useless.

Having said that, I think the idea to make UML complete in the sense that you
can model any program in full detail with it and then generate source code as
a sort of assembly from it has, to say it lightly, not yet brought the
benefits proponents claimed it would, and has needlessly complicated the
grammar for other use cases such as the one above.

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dsmithn
This is the kind of thing that by the time I need to make another diagram I
will have forgotten about it. Hopefully I'll never need to, but if I do I'm
bookmarking this in hopes I'll remember.

It's not complicated, no fancy UI or flashy landing page. Nice web app.

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nickmain
Other than the sharing/social aspect how much has been added on top of the
underlying jsUML2 library ?

I ask because jsUML2 looks interesting and I am wondering how usable it is out
of the box. (I need statecharts which umlbin doesn't yet support).

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trigras
Basically only tool selection menu was added (and some context menu removed
;). IMHO to use it out of the box it's quite easy, just maybe there is lack of
documentation. As main drawbacks I could note missing documentation and not so
easy configurable .. However at the moment it fits my needs.

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impostervt
I'm not a fan of UML, but some of my coworkers are. Seems like a great tool
for sharing UML quickly, without everyone having to get Visio.

Feature request: sequence diagrams. They love those things.

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devgutt
I used to use UML diagrams a lot, especially Sequence diagrams. But some time
ago I started to use the own code as my sequence diagram, without comments,
only declarative enough names. IMO Sequence diagrams are really helpful to
explore ideas and make the first analysis, but terrible afterwards to maintain
the code.

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jonaldomo
Link is down. I would be extremely interested in reading about how much
traffic it took to bring it down and what architecture you are running on.

~~~
trigras
up to 5 request per second

AWS micro instance apache + tomcat java, mysql

My ques is that may be due to some misconfiguration (java or tomcat).

~~~
devgutt
Out of curiosity. Are you using autoscaling or aws beanstalk?

~~~
trigras
EC2 micro instance

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fatiherikli
Here is the similar project: <http://dbpatterns.com>

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evolve2k
yUML is a great quick tool that has been around a while, diagrams are written
in a really simple markup format and then covert into diagrams.

<http://www.yuml.me/>

