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In these days, I was using atlassian’s products in my work. There are a lot of products, like JIRA, Bamboo, Stash. But I do like its knowledge management tool, aka Confluence. It is very convenient to manage all of your documents output in development. And there are also a lot of plug-ins in Confluence, to support all kinds of content in pages. Since I need to draw some UML diagrams, I met PlantUML, which is represented as a plug-in in Confluence.
At the very beginning, I was not used to use PlantUML. Because I am used to draw UML diagrams in visual mode, in which I can drag and drop simply to create diagrams I need. More exactly, what I used before are modeling tools, in which it is only part of functions to produce UML diagrams. But PlantUML is not a UML modeling tool, even it’s not a visual UML draw tool. You have to write some codes firstly, and then these codes are rendered as UML diagrams.
In this case, I really didn’t like PlantUML. I could not understand why there was such a tool when everyone is trying to make work visualize and convenient.
But I had no better choice at that time if I want to use Confluence. Yes, I can use pictures instead of PlantUML, it’s true. But there is problem, that pictures can not be maintained, aka I can not update content of pictures conveniently.
In this situation, I had to use PlantUML. Fortunately, when I got used to PlantUML, I found it was really a good way to draw and manage UML diagram in documents like Confluence pages. UML diagrams can be easily described with readable code, and can be rendered as pictures in documents by plug-in.
That’s little story about how I met and got like PlantUML.
And now, let’s take a look on PlantUML.