In a previous post we learned how to use the built-in icons from the OpenIconic set. In the newer PlantUML versions several icon sets have been added as standard library. These sets include AWS icons, Font Awesome icons, Devicons and Google Material icons.

To use an icon from the icon set we must include the icon using the !include statement. In our PlantUML definition we reference the icon with the syntax <$iconName>. In the following example PlantUML definition we include 2 icons from the Font Awesome and Devicons icon sets:

Today I visited the UXDX Conf in Amsterdam.

PlantUML mostly does a good job organizing elements and arrows in the resulting diagram. But we can help PlantUML by defining the arrow direction in our PlantUML definition. We can use the keywords up, down, left and right inside the arrow definition.

In the following example we have five rectangles connected with arrows. We define the arrow direction for each arrow.

One of the command line options of Gradle is --offline. With this option we run Gradle in offline mode to indicate we are not connected to network resources like the internet. This could be useful for example if we have defined dependencies in our build script that come from a remote repository, but we cannot access the remote repository, and we still want to run the build. Gradle will use the locally cached dependencies, without checking the remote repository. New dependencies, not already cached, cannot be downloaded of course, so in that scenario we still need a network connection.

We can check in our build script if the --offline command line argument is used. We can use this to disable tasks that depend on network resources so the build will not fail. To see if we invoked our build with the --offline option we can access the property gradle.startParameter.offline. The value is true if the command line argument --offline is used and false if the command line argument is not used.

Gradle added an incubation feature to Gradle 4.6 to add command line options for custom tasks. This means we can run a task using Gradle and add command line options to pass information to the task. Without this feature we would have to use project properties passed via the -P or --project-property. The good thing about the new feature is that the Gradle help task displays extra information about the command line options supported by a custom task.

To add a command line option we simply use the @Option annotation on the setter method of a task property. We must make sure the argument for the setter method is either a boolean, Boolean, String, enum, List<String> or List<enum>. The @Option annotation requires an option argument with the name of the option as it must be entered by the user. Optionally we can add a description property with a description about the option. It is good to add the description, because the help task of Gradle displays this information and helps the user of our custom task.

A low code approach to composing microservice architecture diagrams from per service context diagrams.

This year marks only the second edition of JSHeroes, but it’s organized really professional. Speakers are from all over the world, and the location is a chique hotel. A few kilometers out of the city center. Its grandeur reminds us a bit of the Grand Budapest Hotel. The name too by the way: the Grand Hotel Italia. On Wednesday we followed an Angular Masterclass. Thursday and Friday are the JSHeroes conference days. The talks are just 30 minutes each. A quick pace and quite diverse topics. The popular frameworks (React, Angular and Vue) were covered much, but also webfonts, Codesandbox, and V8, the engine behind JavaScript.