conceptual model diagram builder

Aaron Watters aaron.watters at gmail.com
Tue Jun 22 15:54:15 EDT 2010


Hi folks.

I design a lot of conceptual models and I usually do it on
paper or on a white board.  I sometimes need to send an
image of a conceptual model (not a photo) and I really
don't know of a good tool which works the way I'd like
to make images of conceptual models.
Particularly I'd like the layout to be automatic.

So I built a conceptual diagram model builder
in Python using WHIFF and released it as a WHIFF demo.

It does auto-layout and also allows you to snapshot
the model as a JSON structure.  Here it is:

http://whiffdoc.appspot.com/tests/schema/diagram#

I will certainly continue to fiddle with it but I'm pretty
pleased with how it works now, so I wanted to share it.

More info:
    * Implemented in WHIFF: whiff.sourceforge.net.
    * Drawn using HTML 5 2D canvas feature http://dev.w3.org/html5/2dcontext/.
    * Interactive elements courtesy of jQueryUI http://jqueryui.com/.
    * Dynamic server/page interactions use AJAX technology.
    * Data encoding uses JSON http://www.json.org/.
    * Data modeling conventions adapted from Analysis Patterns:
Reusable Object Models by Martin Fowler.
    * Distributed in the whiff test directory. Browse the source at
this link.
       http://code.google.com/p/whiff/source/browse/#hg/trunk/test/root/schema

Let me know what you think.  If you want to get the source you will
have to
clone the google code mercurial archive (it isn't part of the whiff
release yet).
   -- Aaron Watters

===
This one goes to 11.



More information about the Python-list mailing list