Look here for the latest developments and releases of SEQUENCE.

At the suggestion of Chris Winters I've made a couple of changes to SEQUENCE. Firstly, instead of the name of the first object on the diagram being set via the preferences it is now set from the text description of the sequence. Secondly, you can now generate a PNG image for a diagram in headless mode.

I originally wrote SEQUENCE as a quick and dirty hack and that showed most strongly in the parser and diagram layout portions. At that time the easiest way to set the name of the initial object was to use the preferences. Chris's suggestion prompted me to look at that assumption. With the refactored code in the latest version it turned out it was easy to change things so that the first entry in the sequence becomes the name of the initial object. For example.

(CommentFactory newComment
    (Comment new 
      (IDGen nextID newId) 
      (Transaction add)))

Note that the name of the first method is not shown in the diagram, though there is a tooltip on the GUI now that does show it.

The second change, headless operation, was also much easier because of code restructuring. However, what really made it possible was the java.awt.headless system property. There are now two ways to start SEQUENCE. If you use
java -jar sequence.jar
then the GUI is shown as before. If you use
java -Djava.awt.headless=true sequence.jar <input_file.ext>
then the file input_file.ext, where ext is any extension, is read and a PNG image is written to the file input_file.png I've not yet tested calling this using cgi but it should work.

Here's the executable jar file sequence.jar, and a jar of the source code, sequence_src.jar.