Playfair with EchoSVG

Pie Chart

You may have noticed that the Playfair project started with the JFreeSVG library and has now switched to the EchoSVG library. Both libraries have their advantages and disadvantages, but JFreeSVG’s GPL 3.0 license in particular makes working with it difficult in many projects, often even impossible. With the next version 0.7.0, Playfair will switch to the Apache 2.0 license. This would be a little too little content for a blog post, so let’s take a look at one of EchoSVG’s weaknesses.

Diagram As Code

Java Bibliotheken

I recently sat in a lecture about PlantUML and the advantages of Diagram As Code. Diagram As Code is a special variant of Documentation As Code. It is the possibility for software developers to create their documentation in the form of text files without the use of word processing systems. The advantage is obvious, the developer can use his documentation like his source code. Versioning, automatically creating comparisons, transforming, validating and much more. This gave me the idea of developing something similar.