Show HN: Blotato – Declarative Architecture Diagrams | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Blotato – Declarative Architecture Diagrams

app.blotato.com

20 pointszen_lava8 comments

Hi there - I built Blotato to simplify creating and maintaining complex architecture diagrams, by combining declarative diagrams and automatic layout algorithms. I've spent hundreds of hours creating and painfully updating diagrams in LucidCharts and other tools. And I always found it painful (1) there's no other option besides drag-and-drop (2) which makes updating them tedious, re-arranging lots of boxes and arrows. This is a rough initial version and I appreciate any feedback!

On Windows/Chrome, the left panel holding the diagram specification renders at about 150px wide, so it's really hard to read.

Bigger picture, I think declarative diagrams are great. I do think beyond the challenge in getting a specification for a diagram to line up with a specification of a system in some domain, there's the challenge to support many flavors of system specification over a common diagramming substrate, and that that will be an important problem for you to solve.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll update the left panel.

In future versions, I'm thinking of creating templates for different types of system specs, where each template applies a different set of autolayout algorithms.

Looks great so far. I feel like I've tried almost every text-based diagramming tool ever made.

The lang reminds me a little of graphviz/dot but hopefully with better layout options.

Are there docs available? Do you have icons/objects for other clouds (GCP) ?

Is the main site done? (https://www.blotato.com/) - nav jump links are not hooked - "get started" links to webflow

not done yet, just looking to get initial feedback on the demo version

Is this reskinned PlantUML?

Nope, but I've used PlantUML for sequence diagrams before. I'd like to focus more on software architecture diagrams where layouts are less structured, more variable. I'd also like to focus on sleek presentation-ready UI (although I realize I have a long way to go there).

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