My day job is EAI/SOA design & implementation. I often run into the need to write something to monitor short/long running processes for testing or monitoring purposes. I've written a sequence diagram generator for this purpose before but it suffered a number of shortcomings:
- It was a Java API that needed to be hosted somewhere and executed on the server
- Each time the diagram changed or the status of a message changed, the diagram needed to be regenerated. This also lead to caching problems.
- The diagram is very static.
To solve these issues I decided to use this project as a reason to learn Actionscript 3 and write the whole thing as a Flash Control. I'll be finishing it up over the next few weeks:
Features:
- Self contained .SWF file that generates sequence diagrams from and XML description.
- The diagram is explorable. Mouse over items to see if any further information is available. Items can be minimized to improve readability of large diagrams.
- Columns can be dragged to re-order them.
- Comments can be added,dragged and linked to items.
- Integrates (via STOMP) with JMS message brokers to recieve diagrams and dynamic updates via queues and topics. The diagram is dynamicly updated on the users page with no further server action.
Development Environment/Tools:
Seeing as this was developed with all open source tools, I'll also publish the source, probably on Goggle Code.
You can find it
here.