October 14, 2011 Design Patterns
Andriy Buday
14 years ago
As you may know I’m working on Design Patterns book in Ukrainian and as most of the posts I had on patterns have UML-s, I’m considering having UML diagrams in book as well to be consistent. Thus I can either prepare them in some UML tool or just draw. See yourself.
Drawn by me
Also drawn by me, but in advanced tool
And here how it looks like when on paper
Why I like hand-drawn option
I would like to use hand-drawn variant because it will make the book look cheery and will make the difference. It might bring some interest like “So what’s is really on that diagram?”. Also I still don’t position book as an “official” book, so I would like to have some bits of unofficially. Especially taking into account that auditory is mostly young starting developers.
Why I don’t like it
I’m of course hesitating, as this variant in its origin is inaccurate (of course I can try harder). Also maintaining such diagrams is bit more difficult, but I don’t see any problem with this.
Please help me choose!
[Added later (wasn’t in original post)]
After I posted this friend suggested me to use this online uml generation tool. And it would be great another option to consider, but it generates not really what I want:
But it was extremely nice, that to generate picture above I just used this code:
# Abstract Factory
[Cat]^[WoodenCat], [Cat]^[TeddyCat]
[Bear]^[WoodenBear], [Bear]^[TeddyBear]
[IToyFactory]^[WoodenToysFactory], [IToyFactory]^[TeddyToysFactory]
[TeddyToysFactory]uses-.->[TeddyBear]
[TeddyToysFactory]uses-.->[TeddyCat]
[Client]->[IToyFactory]
[Client]->[Cat]
[Client]->[Bear]
[WoodenToysFactory]uses-.->[WoodenCat]
[WoodenToysFactory]uses-.->[WoodenBear]
Nice tool, indeed, but for extremely simple diagrams.
[Added later (15 Oct, after comments)]
After comment by Satomi Joba I tried community edition of another tool, called Astah. Below is what I was able to draw by it. Two things about it: 1) Drawing in this tool is just fabulous, smooth and easy. For me it was more quick and intuitive drawing than in such matured tools as Enterprise Architect for example. 2) Although I’m not sure I like this bold borders and I wasn’t able to quickly change styling of diagram (maybe because of edition I used?).
