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I would like to know what guys are using to make diagram of your application/service architecture ?

I would like to make diagrams representing the different layer of the whole application and for some parts go deeper (class level)

John Saunders
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GillouX
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11 Answers11

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Visio

John D. Cook
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Enterprise Architect

Mitch Wheat
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  • EA was a life saver, few years back. Now it's pretty bloated though: it does everything you need, but it also has tons and tons of options on the menus. But that's probably the way it has to be, until a new kid on the block comes forward :/ Oh, and it has literarily "meeting ready" reports on a single push-button, that's really nice feature to have. – IgorJ Jun 30 '13 at 13:30
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I used dia, for couple of my small (300+ classes) projects, that I did for my school/work.

It is general enough so you can draw anything in it, and it even can generate code.

jb.
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  • a small project with 300+ classes? maybe not..... – Mitch Wheat May 10 '09 at 13:16
  • My projects tend to be that size, I worked on couple 'big enterprisey' projects in JAVA that had thousands classes, i consider them big. – jb. May 10 '09 at 14:26
  • if you have thousands of classes then you are doing something wrong. how can you work with that? – Michal B. Feb 10 '12 at 09:37
  • It's easty to have couple houndred of in single person project. In enterprisey project it is easy to have thousand of classes. With proper use of IDE, tests and so on it is manageable! – jb. Feb 10 '12 at 21:31
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What specific approach are you using? Lucidchart is great for UML schemas. No plugin or download needed.

user1748034
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There are a lot of UML tools that can be used to draw UML diagrams. Some of them can also generate skeleton code etc but you don't have to bother with that if you don't want to.

Here's a couple of open source uml tools:
StarUML (windows)
UMLet (runs in java on windows, linux, mac)

edit: For the sortof diagram you are talking about - application/service architecture - you could draw a UML Deployment Diagram

edit2: For non-UML diagrams sounds like Dia is a good open source alternative to Visio

codeulike
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You can also use ARIS Express, which is free-of-charge. For example, you can use a system landscape model to describe your application architecture. Another interesting diagram might be IT infrastructure model, where you can describe the deployment of your application. Or you outline the main workflows of the application using a business process. ARIS Express also features a data model.

ARIS Community
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I use dia for this task

skrat
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it's not really to make uml diagrams but more "general diagram" of the whole architecture of an application (which is more like a service compound of several application)

GillouX
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I use inkscape to visualize class interactions and architecture. It's a general purpose SVG editor, so you're free to be more creative and expressive in your diagrams than with Dia or Visio (both of which I've used).

The learning curve is gentle, it provides everything I've ever needed for building graphs and flow charts, and once you've got the hang of it, you've got a very powerful graphics editor in your arsenal.

drfloob
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There are many different modeling tools out there, I just discovered ArgoUML [http://argouml.tigris.org] which you might want to check out.

Makach
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we use Dabbleboard. It's great for remote team members. just give them a url and it updates on the fly. here is a link to one of our diagrams

http://dabbleboard.com/draw?b=135471&i=7&c=7b1781adc4a54887d5d414378575b890e38469de

eiu165
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