The future of UmlCanvas

[christophevg]

This week the UmlCanvas Github project welcomed its 50th watcher. I don't know if you can call that an important milestone, but even though the project has been dormant for some time now, it seems that people (that means you) are (still) interested in the goal of this project.

So I decided to open this issue (which hopefully pops up on your dashboards because you're watching the project) to request feedback. Please do reply and let me know why you are interested in UmlCanvas, if you have any concrete plans with it (if it becomes stable) and maybe even try to convince me to pick it up again and bring it to a really useable level.

Creating issues will off course get you bonus points and give me real leads to the things that need to be addressed (if I wake up the project again) :-)

regards,
Christophe VG

[killwing]

i love UmlCanvas. why is the official site closed? i'm still looking forward to use it to draw sequence diagram..

[christophevg]

The official site is closed because I don't want people to think the project is alive and kicking ;-)

There are a few reasons for that: First: at this very moment I don't have any personal use for it anymore (though that could change easily), so I just don't pick it up that easily. Secondly: when I started working on UmlCanvas almost 4 years ago, the -ecosystem was a different world, urging me to build everything from scratch, e.g. the underlying Canvas2D-layer. At this moment there are numerous projects that provide wonderful support to build things like UmlCanvas.

If I would pick up this project again, I would definitely start with a re-write from scratch - still keeping a lot of the underlying design - which would probably result in a much better product in far less time.

Who knows what the next months will bring? If I find a good reason, I know I feel like doing this again.

Thanks for your support!
Christophe VG

[killwing]

Yes, there're lots of projects to manipulate canvas. Also there're many web-based UML tools, but most of them are running & processing on the server side and not open source.

For now, i still can not find an javascript library that better than UmlCanvas to draw class diagram.
I'm very like the way use DSL that i could generate the DSL file from my project and render it using UmlCanvas.

PS: could you show me some good web UML tools that you're currently using or some cool projects that provide support to build things like UmlCanvas? Thank you!

[christophevg]

I'm currently working very little to not with UML, so I'm surely not at the forefront of what's available. Over the past few months I've seen a few Javascript libraries that implement things like path-routing, which would make implementing associations and the likes a lot easier. Also reusing some other pretty standard Javascript libraries these days would help a lot ;-)

If I come across them again, I'll add them to a wiki page here somewhere as a reference list for - maybe - later use.