Eclipse DSM-Viewer

Eclipse DSM-Viewer plugin is a powerful tool for counting, analysing and displaying of all kinds of dependencies between the Java source code components.

In simple words, this is an SWT/JFace app which improves Eclipse code analisys functionality. It`s main tasks are:

• To found and count all kinds of relationships between the components of Java programming systems are opened at Eclipse workspace (on all levels of their code hierarchy).
• To display these relationships using the special format of "Design Structure Matrices" or DSMs.

This application also provides all kinds of Eclipse integration: code navigation, context help, flexible settings customization, and so on.

Licensed with Eclipse Public License v1.0

Currently graph representation is the most popular format when representing programming systems with their internal relationships: example. But if the graph contains more than 30 nodes (or 100+ edges), it becomes almost unreadable for an average person.

Modern Java applications contains thousands or even millions dependencies: 10.000 and more classes per Java application nowadays is really not a limit. DSMs solves such readability problems (you can see comparison for simple examples here link!).

DS-matrices remains human-readable in case of huge sets of code is being analysed because DS-matrix can display the huge set of code dependencies in more intuitive way, than graphs.

In many cases DSM representation of systems is more convenient and useful for most commonly used dependency analysing tasks.

Since the proposed plugin is announced to support dependency counting/analising/displaying for large and complex programming systems, as the first thing we should be able to display dependencies between Java code components in form of DS-matrices, not in the form of graphs.

But we don`t deny the further need to have ability to view the dependencies for some particles of result DSMs as graphs (We will return to this during the next plugin releases).

1. What is "relationship" (or "dependency") in terms of Java code?
2. Why do we need the such kinds of dependency measuring / visualization tools?
3. What is a "Dependency Structure Matrix" and why this format is useful for dependencies displaying/analyzing?

• The first ready version of plugin (0.0.1) uses the Dtangler library to count dependencies. It displays the DS-Matrices for single scope from 2 allowed scopes: "Java packages" or "Java classes". This version detects the cyclic dependencies and marks appropriate matrix cells with the red color. It is the first test version to check Dtangler library possibilities. Operating screenshot is below:

  

• We expect that the next version will use Eclipse AST instead of Dtangler for dependency searching purposes and provide huge set of additional options and improvements. Main of desired improvements:

  • Code navigation;
  • Matrices clusterization (link!);
  • Performance improvement (the first version is unusable for DSMs with size larger than 200x200 cells as it dosn`t support matrix lazy-loading and virtuality);
  • Implementation of wide on-the-fly help support (tooltips, help pages);
  • Implementation of flexible plugin settings (ability to manually set types of dependencies are desired to find, colors, fonts, etc.).

SevNTU-Checkstyle project

DSM Maven plugin