Under the Hat

If you’re a developer, you know how it goes. At the beginning of a project, you draw some UML sketches to get you going. There’s a nice tool to do that. As your project goes on, and your code grows, these diagrams don’t get updated too often. After all, every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system. And for a class model, that representation is the code.

But at some points during your development, you have to communicate with some stakeholders. They want to know what your class model looks like. So you have to provide them with a drawing. Until recently, we went through the trouble of creating these diagrams manually. But those days are over: we found yUMLmeRails

To get yourself a diagram, follow these steps:

cd your_project
script/plugin install \
	git://github.com/nelsonsilva/yUMLmeRails.git
rake yUMLmeRails:download

Your diagram will be saved in your_project/diagrams.

Easy. Nice. Handy. Did I mention ‘pie’ ?

Let’s assume:

• You have an iPhone
• You love your iPhone
• You have a Flickr account
• You want to share your pics by using only one service: Flickr
• You have a Twitter account
• You want to share your pics on Twitter

Now imagine, you can do all this stuff in one go. Life would be great, no?

Enter Flickr2Twitter. Set it up, and you will love your iPhone even more.

Maybe you know it, maybe you don’t but yUML is awesome!

Create and share simple UML diagrams in your blogs, wikis, forums, bug-trackers and emails.

Yesterday I was creating a new class diagram using yUML and besides it’s a great product it was a bit cumbersome working in a small textarea and pressing ‘Generate!’ (all the time). I fired up textmate and created a diagram using the yUML syntax. A couple of minutes later I had ruby script which generated the diagram using yUML by taking a text file as input.

Thanks to Jeweler it’s dead easy to create gems and release them to Gemcutter so a yumlcmd gem was born.

Installation

sudo gem install yumlcmd

Usage

yumlme -f your-diagram.txt

Example your-diagram.txt

[Customer]+1->*[Order]
[Order]++1-items >*[LineItem]
[Order]-0..1>[PaymentMethod]

Syntax overview: http://yuml.me/diagram/scruffy/class/draw

Ouput

yuml-output.png

I hope you like it as much as I do :)

I use textmate for all things ruby, rails, txt, blog, xml, … and while doing so I enjoy using the railscasts textmate theme from Ryan Bates. Nice, clean and easy on the eyes.

Since I was never really happy with the standard Xcode themes I decided to port the textmate theme to an Xcode theme.

After days of work, or was it weeks, I got it right. I think.

No really, it just took about 5 minutes clicking around in the Xcode theme editor. You can find it here.

Enjoy!