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OpenFLOW – Quickly make beautiful infrastructure diagrams local to your machine

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Re: OpenFLOW – Quickly make beautiful infrastructure diagrams local to your machine

#11
post #8

This is a little tangential, but I've wondered for a while if there's a better way to visualise the composition of software systems. Often, there's not only a single way to look at one: There's a user interaction flow through components, but those components also consist of hardware; the hardware might be virtual and composed of several, spread, sub-components, or even containers. You can go down this path pretty dee…

There are quite a few tools that offer this model-based approach; you define your resources in a model, then use them in multiple perspectives to show different aspects like you describe. Some, like Ilograph[0] (my project), offer interactivity and zooming.

[0] https://www.ilograph.com

Re: OpenFLOW – Quickly make beautiful infrastructure diagrams local to your machine

#12
I always loved the isometric diagrams on Clive Maxfield's [1] books about electronics. Since a lot of circuits are non-planar (flip flops, semiconductor layers, FPGA architecture), adding a perspective view makes things uncluttered, and easier to understand and remember. I think it translates well to many technologies.

[1] https://www.clivemaxfield.com

Re: OpenFLOW – Quickly make beautiful infrastructure diagrams local to your machine

#13
post #8

This is a little tangential, but I've wondered for a while if there's a better way to visualise the composition of software systems. Often, there's not only a single way to look at one: There's a user interaction flow through components, but those components also consist of hardware; the hardware might be virtual and composed of several, spread, sub-components, or even containers. You can go down this path pretty dee…

Some very good points, I totally agree, I suppose as you said you get to a point in your abstraction where it either loses meaning or becomes too complex to view. I think it would be a fantastic thing to try! Go build it!

Re: OpenFLOW – Quickly make beautiful infrastructure diagrams local to your machine

#16
post #8

This is a little tangential, but I've wondered for a while if there's a better way to visualise the composition of software systems. Often, there's not only a single way to look at one: There's a user interaction flow through components, but those components also consist of hardware; the hardware might be virtual and composed of several, spread, sub-components, or even containers. You can go down this path pretty dee…

[deleted]

Re: OpenFLOW – Quickly make beautiful infrastructure diagrams local to your machine

#20
This is awesome. I built a lightweight home status server called Stylus that would probably pair very well with this:

https://github.com/mmastrac/stylus

It works by automatically changing CSS classes, and it looks like the underlying isoflow library should support this.

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