Hi all, after the conference last week I got inspired to try out some event modeling. For example in the presentation “Blueprinting your Axon app with Event Modeling” from Frank and Florian I saw some nice diagrams.
I did a quick search on the internet, but I wonder if you can recommend particular tools to create event models. Every input is welcome!
Hello @Rachid! Great to hear you’ve been inspired by them, event modeling is a great tool.
We often use Miro to do event modeling with clients. It’s very flexible and easy to set up, and even inexperienced people can use it quite effortlessly.
There are alternatives available, for example, ONote. In addition, I created a PlantUML-inspired tool on Github which might be interesting: Eventmodeler - by AxonIQ
Good luck on your event modeling journey!
Thx for your quick reply. I briefly played with ONote, but I think I need to put some more effort in it to properly learn this tool.
I’m already a fan of plantUML and mermaid and I really like how low the bar is for Eventmodeler to just play around. Next week I’m definitely going to spend more time on this one. Is there another way to render the models than using that webpage? Would be nice if I can run the tool locally for example.
There’s currently no way for eventmodeler to render it in other formats. It was a proof of concept that needs to be expanded in the future. I’m pretty sure I will do that at some point, but I cannot make any promises. Any feedback for future development is therefore pretty valuable, so let me know!
There’s also going to be a new tool in town: https://www.ebdconnect.com/
It’s created by someone we know pretty well, and there’s going to be a closed beta in a few weeks. Feel free to contact him to try the tool out.
Ok, I understand. In the mean time I found the related Github repo as well: GitHub - Morlack/eventmodeler: Poc implementation for event modeling tool (And I created an issue)
Nice to point out here in case someone want to build upon this tool 
For future development I think it would be nice is to have some sort of “commandline” option as a starting point. Then we can render/generate images locally. Also it makes it easier to use your favourite text editor and manage the model definitions in Git. This would also pave the way to integrate it in other tools perhaps.
Thnx for pointing out EBD Connect, let’s see what they’ll offer.
If you have a little more patience I will be releasing a brand new tool that combines both event storming concepts and event modeling.
The resulting models will be able to be exposed to template based code generation in any language.
Drop me an email address at arjan@ebdconnect.com to receive an invite to the closed beta starting in around two weeks time.
Hello all, I was inspired by the Eventmodeler tool and expanded upon it by creating a PlantUML library: Event Modeling library for PlantUML
It is built for fast iteration during Event Modeling sessions, and because it uses PlantUML it should benefit from compatibility with many other systems. Maybe it is useful to you!
Whoah @Marries, this is fantastic stuff! Can’t wait to try it out, it looks really useful. It even works in my obsidian setup
Nice @Marries I like the PlantUML way of working. Unfortunately it’s not very stable.
In VSCode and IntelliJ it doesn’t work (IllegalArgumentException). I tried to let it parse by a locally installed plantuml / graphviz dot, but I didn’t get that working. Is a specific version of these tools required?
In Obsidian it sometimes work when using rendering on the PlantUML server.
When using remote rendering, it sometimes works. But quite regularly fails on line 2 (include once) with the error: Can't open URL. I see this same behaviour when using the online PlantUML editor. I also see this in the live edit example link provided in the Github repo.
Adding an extra empty line or whitespace can either fix or cause this problem. I guess because that triggers a re-render. And the rendered results is cached. So it won’t re-render when you remove the line again. It’s a bit flaky to work with, but tips on this part are welcome.
Perhaps you have some hints to improve the stability? Or any other tips in the realm of PlantUML that can help? I really like this way of working. And hope to use this currently for some designs I needs to make. I’m willing to put some extra effort in it to get this working for me now 
Just FYI, the tool Arjan mentioned is online now.
Thnx for mentioning that Gerard.
I sent an email to @arjan about a year ago for the closed beta, but never got a reply. I think you missed that?
To be honest, a pricing model of around $100,- / month won’t work for me in my current situation. For the time being I’m simply searching for a diagramming tool and I think Model My Code is much more than that. If the price was lower or there is a longer trial period I could consider to give it a try.
Thanks, nice that it suits your way of working! And hopefully we can resolve the issues. Could you open an issue on Github? Please include the exact versions you are using.
I can reproduce the issue when rendering through the online PlantUML renderer. I’m not sure why it cannot open the URL.
The library works for me in IntelliJ. I’m using the “PlantUML Integration” plugin by Vojtěch Krása, version 7.4.2-IJ2023.2.
I created this issue for the Cannot open URL error.
After reading this closed issue I discovered the IllegalArgumentException is related to the IntelliJ plugin. When running plantuml on the CLI it produces a PNG without errors. Not sure in which repo to create the issue now…
Please note that other PlantUML diagrams are working fine in IntelliJ so it might be the combination of your script with the plugin in IntelliJ. I’m using the same version of hte plugin: 7.4.2-IJ2023.2 and both IntelliJ and CLI are running on JDK 17.
