One of Mina's fundamental principles is to facilitate onboarding and usage.

For this reason, unlike many other tools, Mina does not introduce a new Domain-Specific Language (DSL) to provide its functionalities but relies on the PlantUML DSL (opens in a new tab).

Specifically, Mina supports the syntax of the official PlantUML C4 model standard library (opens in a new tab).

This allows you to reuse PlantUML C4 code created with other tools and immediately leverage Mina's capabilities. If you decide to leave Mina (but we hope you don't), you can still reuse the PlantUML code created in Mina with other tools that support PlantUML.

PlantUML (opens in a new tab) was born in 2009 and is a well-known open-source tool with a mature and widely used DSL. In the meantime, several PlantUML extensions have been released. Among these is C4-PlantUML (opens in a new tab), the standard library that supports the specifications of the C4 model.

For further details about how Mina reads, parses and processes the C4-PlantUML code, please visit the architectural documentation.