Sequence diagrams sans desktop software

So we’ve been doing some upfront design work for a client who’s managing their dev processes using RUP. Technically we’re in the elaboration phase and we’ve had a need to do a bunch of sequence diagramming for some implementation briefs. First off, let me say that after having a whole stack of sequence diagrams to do, I’m just about done with Visio. To get things to go smoothly in Visio we had to download some third party UML 2 templates here, which is no biggie really, but the constant random formatting changes when moving things around and the ridiculous semantic errors despite an apparently correct model have caused significant hair loss or greying on my team.

If you’re into the whole UML 2.0 modeling stuff then another excellent resource for under $200 is the Enterprise Architect software, but we were looking for something with even less overhead and mucking about. A member of my team went a-googlin’ and found a great little site for generating web-based UML diagrams. From the “about” information:

The SD Generator was created by Steve Hanov, who does not like using Microsoft Visio. Comments or suggestions are appreciated.

Once you get the syntax down, this is a nifty little utility and moves things along quickly relative to most desktop UML packages I’ve used. The following simple syntax…

Alice->Bob: Authentication Request note right of Bob: Bob thinks about it. Bob->Alice: Authentication Response

…yields the following image.

About the only we can’t do that we’ve wished for here and there is the ability to “ref” other diagrams. Kudos to Steve!