Tool of the day: websequencediagrams.com

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 11:44:58 GMT

Today I needed to draw a number of sequence diagrams and since I do not have a program installed for this I decided to look online. My search was successful and I was very happy to find websequencediagrams.com. What sets this tool apart from others is that you do not draw the sequence diagram but you write it. Just up my alley as a developer. Using easy syntax like the below you can quickly stitch a diagram together.

Alice->Bob: Go do it!
Bob->Alice: Okay!
Bob->Charles: Help me please!
Charles->Bob: Done!
Bob->Alice: Done!

The above would yield this diagram.
There's a number of styles to choose between such as napkin, plain UML etc.

There are probably other such tools but this fit the profile and use case for me.

Google saves the day for Notes plugin developers

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 10:29:36 GMT

Alan Cooke (member of the Redbooks team) just pinged me on Sametime and pointed me to a greate piece of news. As you might remember Google acquired Instantiations a while back. Instantiations developed a couple of developer tools for GUI building, code analysis and UI testing. Today all our prayers had been heard and Google is making all the tools from Instantiations free!!!. How sweet is that?!

The article referenced above describes the different tools and screenshots.

The reason this is important to you as a Lotus guy or gal is that WindowBuilder Pro for SWT makes it very easy to quickly mock up or build the GUI for your SWT based plugins. You simply drag'n'drop components onto the screen to build the UI. Think of the XPages UI but for SWT components. Very nice.

So how do you get the tools? Simply head over to the respective Google page to learn more and/or install. The direct links are:

Did I mention that all the tools are now free?!?

Once you go the tool page you'll see a link to the "Download" page in the menu on the left. The page has links to update sites for easy installation. The tools work with Eclipse 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6.

P.S.: There is also a GWT designer tool (Google Web Toolkit) available (tool page is here). The tool is very nice if you develop GWT applications.

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Tool of the day: websequencediagrams.com

Google saves the day for Notes plugin developers