The night before his JavaZone presentation, Johannes and I had fun making diagrams for some of the slides in his presentation. He had prepared some basic sketches of the concepts he wanted to get across, and asked me to help him transform those sketches into comprehensible drawings done in an informal style. So I whipped out my tablet and went to work.

This was the original deployment sketch:

And this is what I turned it into:

That one was by far the easiest and most straightforward diagram to make.

Here is the original lifecycle sketch:

I turned it into this:

That one took a little more adjustment.

Here is a copy of the original dependency sketch:

Considering the fact that I’m not a programmer and know nothing about this particular subject matter, trying to understand these rather technical concepts, let alone creating a diagram to communicate them, was a complete and total nightmare. Some of the relationships described by the sketch represent processes, and some represent content hierarchies, e.g. the application module contains the WAR file, which contains the business logic; the .zip file is dependent on the assembly plugin, which is in turn packages on the WAR file (into the ZIP file). Some of the items in the diagram are files, some are plugins, and some are modules. Johannes was patient in explaining all this stuff to me. We went through innumerable iterations of “Is this right?”…”No, this arrow needs to point this way.”…”OK, how about this?”… The final diagram ended up like this:

The slides have gotten a lot of positive comments. I’m happy with the results, and I really enjoyed this whole process. I’m glad I got to put to use some of the skills I intend to use if I ever become an information architect, and it’s nice have a better idea of what Johannes is working with in his job.