Those of you who follow other sources of information we provide, might have noticed that on Jan 28 at 19:54, a 0.3 release of UmlCanvas landed on our public download zone. At that very same moment, all of our sites started using this release, since we use one publicly shared instance of it. So if you visited one of our sites in the last 10 days, you were using this 0.3 release. If you haven’t noticed anything special, we did a good job, and this seems to be the case so far.
Wait a second, … we pushed a major – in fact a minor, but as long as we are still releasing within the scope of a major 0 (zero) release number, we might as well consider the minor releases major – anyhow … we pushed a major release out and didn’t announce it ?
Yes, that’s exactly what we did 
There were a few good reasons to introduce this short period of radio silence. First of all, I was leaving on holiday the very next day and I was only going to return after a week. Secondly, even if it was a perfect drop-in replacement, our current sites at that time didn’t utilize the new possibilities. Most importantly TheModelFactory, where Geert needed time to move all diagrams to Hosted UmlCanvas. The third reason was that we knew there were going to be issues and we didn’t want to attract too much attention during the week that followed, to allow us to find and resolve these without too much pressure, because by the end of that week, we were to give a presentation @ FOSDEM.
But that’s in the past now. Radio Silence is over and we are more that proud to announce the availability of UmlCanvas 0.3. So, head over to the download site and download a copy of the latest release. Unzip it and browse the examples directory. Take a look at the diagrams, interact with them and take a look at the HTML code to see how easy it is to include diagrams in your own HTML pages. And while you explore these examples, we are going to work hard to get more and better documentation online.
The biggest changes in this release are of course the introduction of the UmlCanvas Inspector and the integration with Hosted UmlCanvas. These two changes realize our second major functional milestone: turning any UmlCanvas based diagram on the web into a full-fletched editor with a central back-end repository. Let’s just look at it and see the beauty of it in action:
First: head over to TheModelFactory and pick any pattern you like. For some reason I just love the Decorator Pattern, but that’s a different story.
Now, hover your mouse over a UmlCanvas-based diagram and press Alt+i.
Meet the UmlCanvas Inspector, move it around, resize it, just the way you like. And start editing of course. You can change the lay-out, add classes, rename classes, … whatever and however you like. Then press the little save icon on the toolbar of the Inspector …
And there we are, at the Hosted UmlCanvas site, ready to save a copy of our modified diagram. As you can see, I moved the Client class – because I think the Client should always be on top. I just can’t wait to commit this.
And with one click, my modified diagram is online. Hosted UmlCanvas has generated an identifier for me. That’s because I wasn’t logged on. If I had logged on I would have been able to choose this identifier, thus customizing the URL where my diagram would be accessible.
If you also performed these actions while following my instructions, you now have also created your own Hosted UmlCanvas diagram and you are ready to send out the URL and share the diagram. The URL will lead you and others to http://hosted.umlcanvas.org/NwQe3GT28E
And off course I can still include it in any HTML-based content … like this blog …
And now the real fun begins, because if you are now looking at the diagram above, you could bring up the Inspector and modify my diagram again, save it to Hosted UmlCanvas and use in your own pages.
One final note: anonymously created diagrams will only remain in our database for 24 hours. We believe that this is currently enough to enable quick collaborative interactions. If you want to use Hosted UmlCanvas diagrams on webpages you just have to sign up for an account. Diagrams saved using such a named account remain in our datastores and can be used for documentation purposes.
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