One of the challenges in producing an Internet Draft is the creation of
ASCII art call flow diagrams (aka sequence diagrams), such as those in
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3665.txt. I tend to do a lot of these in the
drafts I write.
To make the process easier, a colleague of mine, Dave Ladd, wrote a tool
called callplot. Callplot takes a source file that describes the
callflow, and then compiles it into an ASCII art version suitable for
inclusion in Internet drafts. It does automatic message numbering,
labeling, and so on. It can also spit out other formats that can be
included in MS Office documents, for example.
To illustrate, running callplot on this input:
opt/columnPitch/15
guy/f/Fred
guy/b/Barney
f->b/Please
note/b/Gives bowling ball
b->f/Stuff
b..f/RTP
f->b/Thank You
b->f/You're Welcome
produces this diagram:
Fred Barney
| |
| |
| |
|Please |
|------------->|
| |
| |
| |Gives bowling ball
| |
| |
| |
|Stuff |
|<-------------|
| |
| |
|RTP |
|..............|
| |
| |
|Thank You |
|------------->|
| |
| |
|You're Welcome|
|<-------------|
| |
| |
| |
| |
I think this tool would be useful to the IETF community at large. As a
result, we've decided to make the tool open source, available at
sourceforge at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/callplot
Callplot is written in Java. Please feel free to download, use, and
provide improvements on this tool.
Thanks,
Jonathan R.
--
Jonathan D. Rosenberg, Ph.D. 600 Lanidex Plaza
Chief Technology Officer Parsippany, NJ 07054-2711
dynamicsoft
jdrosen(_at_)dynamicsoft(_dot_)com FAX: (973) 952-5050
http://www.jdrosen.net PHONE: (973) 952-5000
http://www.dynamicsoft.com