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Comment by AlexITC | Hacker News Reader

Hi hn,

It's been almost 3 years since I created CollabUML [1] and got a lot of fun seeing what the hn community was doing with it, since then, I have been thinking many times on making the repository public. Better late than never, right?

It is worth sharing how this started, I was taking interviews including a system-design phase, I used to launch my IDE's to render PlantUML diagrams while I thought that it would be more cool to just share a url instead of sharing my screen.

I made a plan and took the weekend to build it, while I have invested minimal time/effort in this, this side-project is the one that has got the most attention so far.

Anyway, play with it [2] and let's see what we get.

Thanks hn!

- [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955971

- [2]: https://collabuml.com

View on HN

The post title says open source but the repo is missing any license file and the readme doesn't specify your license either (although the license file would be better since GitHub's detector doesn't scan the readme for licensing text)

Good catch! I just added an MIT license.

Thanks for reporting.

It is nice, that you open source it, instead of throwing it away, but you might want to add, that you seem to have no real plan of maintaining this any further:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34556346

"with no plans to go back touching js/ts for anything serious"

Or am I missinterpreting things?

I updated the README to reflect the project state.

> "with no plans to go back touching js/ts for anything serious" > Or am I missinterpreting things?

If for any reason this project became something I'm focused on, I'd just migrate it to Scala.js which is what I feel more comfortable with.

Really cool, thanks for sharing! Would you have chosen Etherpad if you had to do it again? (I'm thinking of adding text collaboration to an open-source project I maintain). Did you get requests to support non-Etherpad servers?

> Would you have chosen Etherpad if you had to do it again?

Hard question, it really depends on my goal, for building a quick prototype, I'd certainly use Etherpad again because it is trivial to launch it, and, more or less, it has worked reliably for the last years. On the other hand, collaborative editors have lots of progress with CRDTs now, it is worth re-evaluating options.

I'd bet that the key would be whether Etherpad can be easily customized to fit your goal.

Of course, as a dev, I was fantasizing about potentially writing my own collaborative editor someday if there was a way to make the project financially viable , for sure, this is the least important thing to make it get there.

> Did you get requests to support non-Etherpad servers?

Not really, I think I have got less than 5 emails about this project so far.

> I'm thinking of adding text collaboration to an open-source project I maintain

If you don't mind sharing, what's that project about?

Thanks for the reply.

> If you don't mind sharing, what's that project about?

I maintain another text-to-diagram language, and we host a playground (https://play.d2lang.com). I want to let people make collaborative rooms on there.

Looks cool!

Integrating collaboration in the simple way I did it should be a piece of cake, feel free to contact me privately if you need any help running etherpad, it is mostly tweaking a few settings and putting nginx on front of it.

It's been almost 3 years since I created PlantUML

An unfortunate typo, PlantUML is a 99.9% Java project residing here [1]. The source is worth reading as it has few external dependencies and a lot of functionality is implemented from scratch, e.g. a JSON parser [2].

[1] https://github.com/plantuml/plantuml

[2] https://github.com/plantuml/plantuml/tree/master/src/net/sou...

Thanks for reporting, I posted this close to my midnight, after that, I wasn't able to edit my comment anymore.

I have contacted hn by email to ask for help.

Fixed now.

> It's been almost 3 years since I created PlantUML [1] and got a lot of fun

I assume you meant to write that you created collabUML 3 years ago, and not accidentally take credit for creating PlantUML itself, which is 14 years old and was created by Arnaud Roques in 2009.

I vouched for this comment, but it seems you are shadow banned, meaning all your posts don't show, except for people who have showdead=1. You might want to work on your personal insult debate style and then email dang and ask for it to be removed.

How about we all ask HN to stop abusing users with this despicable practice?

Ban people or don’t. Instead, HN deliberately wastes people’s time. There’s no excuse for it.

I don’t understand. What do you mean you created PlantUML?

Pretty sure he meant to say “collabUML”

It was a typo. Fixed now.

We use plantuml all the time for sequence diagrams, we check the code into git and use the generated images in the documentation, then the readme.md provides detailed doc of our subsystems, plus people can comment on exact lines of code in the plantuml source during pull requests…

So thanks for building this, it’s awesome!

Some time ago, github introduced support for Mermaid diagrams (https://github.blog/2022-02-14-include-diagrams-markdown-fil...), a nice perk is that you don't need to compile the diagrams because github renders these automatically.

Oh cool, thanks for sharing that.

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