We all know how long it can take to learn a new DTD, XML schema, or an object model for an object-relational mapping. Some of these documents can be 20 pages or longer, and while XML is undoubtedly useful, let's face it - reading through 20 pages of XML is not a walk in the park.
This is why we created Linguine Maps.
Linguine Maps is an open-source Java library that conducts programmatic visualization of various text files, generating from them easy-to-understand entity-relation diagrams. With a diagram it will take you and your team minutes now, instead of perhaps hours, to get familiar with new schema, object-relational mappings, or DTDs. And you can always go back to the source files when more details are needed. Curious what this looks like? There is an image gallery with many samples!
All diagrams produced by the Linguine Maps are precise reflection of the source code. There is absolutely no manual work! It is fully automatic! Try it online now!
In this release we support programmatic visualization for:
* WSDL; for these files we draw relations between service, ports and port types
* Apache ANT build files; for these files we draw task dependency diagrams
* Document Type Definition (DTD) for XML documents; for these files we draw relations between various entities and their attributes
* Apache ObJectRelationBridge (OJB) mapping files; for these files we draw UML-style class diagrams
* Hibernate mapping files; for these files we draw UML-style class diagrams
Programmatic visualization offers a very effective communication tool for software development teams. Integrated into the build process?, it helps to keep documentation up to date automatically. All members of your development team now can have a common set of visual documents, constructed automatically from the source code. The idea was floating around for a while, but we find that our approach has a key advantage.