A Picture is worth a Thousand Words
My current project at work is to get our single sign on initiative off the ground and running. This has meant a lot of design, analysis and diagrams. Diagrams are great for getting the idea about something across in a lot less space and a lot less time than it would take to do in words. I've been using Omni Graffle for most of the diagrams. It is a lot more stable and predictable than Visio and refreshingly less complex than Enterprise Architect. One thing that Enterprise Architect excels at is making Sequence Diagrams. Because EA is for UML only, it is optimized for that. The thing that I haven't like about making sequence diagrams in the past is that they really are an expression of an algorithm, which can often be expressed just fine in code. I was rather excited when my boss introduced me to WebSequenceDiagrams.com. They allow you to express your diagram in a simple DSL and then download it as an image or pdf, or embed in a web page., all for free. I've been embedding the diagrams directly in pages in our wiki. I wanted to include an example here in this post, but wordpress seems to have an issue with embedding external javascript in a page that I haven't figured out yet. You should pop over to their site and give it a try!
