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Diagram Maker: Open sourcing IoT visualization
- straws 6y agoFor instance, with Diagram Maker, application developers can enhance the experience for end customers by enabling them to intuitively and visually build cloud resources required by cloud services such as Workflow Engines (AWS Step Functions) or Infrastructure as Code (AWS CloudFormation) to get the relationships and hierarchies working. Does this mean that Step Functions and CloudFormation will adopt this library? Both already have similar visualizations.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wiradikusuma 6y agoI was hoping something better than Mermaid. Mermaid is great, but esp. its Gantt chart is too simplistic.
- AstroJetson 6y agoHey wiradikusuma, thanks for the reference to Mermaid. I've been looking for a week for something like this to let us drop diagrams into our internal website. This looks like it will do about everything we want. Your point about Gantt carts may be right for you, but for our simple timelines it's good. The real winner for me was the state diagrams. Thanks!
- clawoo 6y agoHave you considered PlantUML[0]? There's plenty of examples on planttext[1]. It's my go-to tool whenever I need to document something visually, whenever I have a meeting with my peers and I want to get them quickly up to speed with the process I have in mind, I just create a quick sequence diagram and we can hit the ground running. [0] https://plantuml.com/state-diagram https://plantuml.com/state-diagram [1] https://www.planttext.com/ https://www.planttext.com/
- AstroJetson 6y agoI've been using a product Websequencediagrams, to create the sequence pictures. There is issues around the licensing, and the company wants to sell a a service. I'm in a lab well behind secure firewalls, so a non starter. There is also the desire to have documents have more types of pictures/ drawings. A Swiss Army knife of drawing tools. In our case it's ok if some of the styles are not as powerful. Thanks for the link!
- speedgoose 6y agoIf you go to the Github repository, it's more understandable and it's actually pretty nice. I wish my company had a use case for this, so I could play with it.
- revicon 6y agoLink to Github repo: https://github.com/awslabs/diagram-maker https://github.com/awslabs/diagram-maker
- djsumdog 6y agoah yes, more Electron cancer
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoThis seems very specific to their IoT products, so it's weird they gave it such a generic name, like "Diagram Maker", which makes it seem like a competitor for something more generally capable like diagrams.net/draw.io.
- tylerdurden91 6y agoThis tool is not limited to AWS IoT products even though that is where this tool was born. You can use this tool for rendering any graph like structure like diagrams, flowcharts, etc. See more details here: https://awslabs.github.io/diagram-maker/why/features.html#data-format-agnostic https://awslabs.github.io/diagram-maker/why/features.html#da....
- Rapzid 6y agoSomewhat surprised they didn't build this on top of something like JointJS..
- notyourwork 6y agoFor those without experience why is this a surprise?
- dzhiurgis 6y agoJointJS documentation makes me wanna cry.
- zdw 6y agoWhy would you use this over diagrams.net/draw.io, which integrates with far more tools (Google Apps, Atlassian tools, Sphinx) and can take text input (Mermaid), and embed editable copies in other file formats like .svg/.png?
- tylerdurden91 6y agoThe target audience of this tool consists of application developers that want to create new applications that require their end users to author graph like structures. They can use this tool and avoid re-implementing basic interactive features like drag & drop, panel management, zooming, undo/redo, etc. Examples of such applications within AWS would be AWS IoT events & AWS IoT Things graph (existing customers), AWS Step functions, AWS Cloudformation (not using the library as of now). Examples of such applications outside AWS would be: https://www.stackery.io/ https://www.stackery.io/, https://www.voiceflow.com/ https://www.voiceflow.com/, https://parabola.io/ https://parabola.io/, etc.
- hectisch23 6y agore-inventing graphviz
- jcims 6y agoTools like this can be very useful in supporting operational use cases in addition to documentation. The tricky part with cloud is how to effectively visualize infrastructure that is composed of a variety of services and attributes. If you have a VPC in each of two regions with dynamodb, s3, ecs, alb, third party providers with access via cross account roles, etc etc it gets tricky to sensibly lay out and demonstrate relationships between the indivdiual components. Hopefully this will get traction and they will start to build in some of this intelligence and perspectives into the application (presumably as a plugin).
- taftster 6y agoRight. When a tool like this can actually "compose" a dataflow using cloud native components (lamdbas, messaging, storage) in real time, this has potential to be super powerful. Think of, for example, Apache NiFi [1] but instead of the components being constrained to a single JVM execution, the components are realized as AWS or Azure services. That "operational view" of your architecture would be super neat, especially when statistics about each component can be visualized in real time. [1] https://nifi.apache.org https://nifi.apache.org
- cjlm 6y agoFrom the screenshots this looked like it was built with [0] or [1] but from their repo it's actually completely homegrown. [0] https://github.com/uber/react-digraph https://github.com/uber/react-digraph [1] https://github.com/wbkd/react-flow https://github.com/wbkd/react-flow
- jka 6y agoFor people who are curious to see some of the functionality, there are a few demos linked from the documentation here: https://awslabs.github.io/diagram-maker/explore/demos.html https://awslabs.github.io/diagram-maker/explore/demos.html
- Areibman 6y agoI've tried so many of these diagramming tools (mermaid, draw.io, figma, lucid chart). But none of them seem to ever match the effectiveness and simplicity of PowerPoint. Why reinvent the wheel so many times?
- mcqueenjordan 6y agoPowerPoint is anything but simple. If PowerPoint works for you, that's great! I have no problem with it. But it doesn't work for me. There is a true need in this area for better diagramming tools. Plantuml and graphviz were good ideas, for which we still lack a killer execution/implementation.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kerng 6y agoI thought the same, even Visio is more complex then PowerPoint- PowerPoint has highest productivity level for me personally in this regards. Funny to say that.
- MisterPea 6y agodraw.io is pretty simple though and very easy to open up and use. I use a mac and am not a big fan of opening up office products for simple/quick things
- hajhatten 6y agoI gotta add excalidraw to this list aswell, so powerful to be able to sketch up diagrams fast, and the collaborative aspect works perfectly.
- app4soft 6y agoTake a look on Heimer app.[0] [0] https://github.com/juzzlin/Heimer https://github.com/juzzlin/Heimer
- ChikkaChiChi 6y agoOmnigraffle is the only one that has been more productive than Powerpoint for me.
- ionforce 6y agoSorry, dog. Gonna need a markup mode.
- zemo 6y agothat sure is an abuse of json
- frsandstone 6y agoGiven that AWS continues to spin out more and more purpose-built technology as needs come up, I wonder whether AWS's long-term strategy is to: - Continue to spin out products to support common business use cases. - Expose commonly used functionality from products via this WYSIWYG tool. - Allow drag and drop programming by connecting services. - Lambdas are the primary way that a business bridges gaps between OOB functionality and business requirements, but are still connected up via this WYSWYG tool once created. It would be a while before it was useful to FAANG, but maybe mom and pop businesses could cheaply partner with AWS experts to ship custom software?
- jtwaleson 6y agoI'm thinking the same. If this happens, it will be amazing.
- WealthVsSurvive 6y agoI'm Building it now. I imagine hundreds of others are as well.
- simonsarris 6y agoShameless plug: If you're looking to develop a web app with diagramming functionality and need considerably more features, I make GoJS: https://gojs.net/latest/index.html https://gojs.net/latest/index.html In addition to basic stuff like zooming and moving nodes GoJS has undo management, data binding, templates, lots of built in tools and layouts and a large showcase of customizations of each, animations, palettes, overviews, etc. It's not free, but if you're looking to use a library to buy developer time, I think it's a much better deal than this offering.
- zdw 6y agoHow much pushback/confusion do you get on the naming of this, given that Golang seems to have taken over all the other go<add stuff here> names?
- simonsarris 6y agoSurprisingly little. Though for a small time the Go releases were almost the same version numbers as GoJS so I'd have a mini heart attack when go-lang made HN frontpage. (for us, Go stands for Graph Object)
- MawKKe 6y agoIn that case you should rename the project GObjectJS to avoid further confusion :-)
- aabbcc1241 6y agoI used to think gevent was a Google made library about event handling. Turn out the g stands for greenlet. I agree gojs is confusing as it seems to be "go-lang implementation in javascript" but I believe no one can claim the ownership over the word "go", as it's an normal English word as well...
- gbuk2013 6y agoThat’s pretty cool. :) About five years ago I built something similar but with a single focus of building interactive network diagrams. We would link individual nodes to backed APIs that would get triggered by certain network events and cause the nodes to animate (e.g. traffic flow, ACL rule hit etc). We would bind buttons on the diagram to send requests to external APIs to trigger requests etc. We also had things like packet counters and traffic flow diagrams on the canvas that would show additional detail. We also repurposed it later to visually build networks of VMs: we would lay out the nodes and networks on the diagram, configure OS, network address settings etc and then hit a button to convert the diagram to an Ansible playbook that would make it all real. That was a really fun project - I should dig out that code and play with Terraform some time. :)
- Marciplan 6y agoIf you want something not-Amazon, try Whimsical.com or miro.com (I adore Whimsical though)
- tmijail 6y agoSimilar project in Java: https://github.com/miho/VWorkflows https://github.com/miho/VWorkflows
- techbubble 6y agoLooks promising, but it's hard to tell without a more full-featured demo. I'm comparing this to Node-RED [0] which is pretty robust and has a large ecosystem. Ultimately, I think the value in diagramming platforms is not just in the software, but the community around it that creates plugins/extensions for different use-cases. [0] https://nodered.org/ https://nodered.org/