While gearing up on a content management project, a few developers were wrangling with how to share solution diagrams between Visio and OmniGraffle. While there is a level of compatibility between the two, its not ideal. While researching, I went off into a related tangent, a cross platform tool that I can manipulate from a text editor or programming language, and ended up reading about Graphviz.

Graphviz – command line tool and DSL (dot) to define and render graphs and diagrams.

Doesn’t sounds like much, but check out this magic: Visualizing traceroute output with Ruby and Graphviz or how about Maven based dependency graphing?

I think prefuse (with the unbelievable looking flare) is an excellent related toolkit to look into next (interaction and animations!!!!!) .

O’Reilly: An Introduction to GraphViz and dot

O’Reilly: Graphviz – Why draw when you can code?

Orgmode.org: org-exp-blocks.el: pre-process blocks in org-mode files in Emacs to generate diagrams – rocking!

Bernt Hansen’s fantastic Org Mode – Organize Your Life In Plain Text! is a working example of the above org-mode use case (and a great org-mode tutorial)

Forever for Now: UML Diagrams Using Graphviz Dot

Haven’t read or experimented with yet, but will…

Linux.com: Create relationship diagrams with Graphviz

IBM developerWorks: Visualize function calls with Graphviz

Graphviz Resources – large list of viewers, navigators, language bindings, etc

WikiViz: A large list of related tools and libraries

ZGRViewer: a Java-based desktop GraphViz/DOT Viewer – Adds interactivity to viewing a dot defined graph.

Graphviz Eclipse plug-in

pydot

NetworkX

UMLGraph