Comments on: Lattix Briefing: Dependency Management

By: patrick smacchia

patrick smacchia — Thu, 03 May 2007 03:24:27 +0000

You might also be interested by the tool NDepend.
http://www.NDepend.com

NDepend analyses source code and .NET assemblies. It allows controlling the complexity, the internal dependencies and the quality of .NET code.

NDepend provides a language (CQL Code Query Language) dedicated to query and constraint a codebase.

It also comes from with advanced code visualization (Dependencies Matrix, Metric treemap, Box and Arrows graph…), more than 60 metrics, facilities to generate reports and to be integrated with mainstream build technologies and development tools.

NDepend also allows to compare precisely different versions of your codebase.

A java version is under development.

By: cote

cote — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 21:19:17 +0000

Bill & Gregg: yes, JDepend was exactly what I was thinking of (as in "couldn't remember). I remember getting transfixed on the new vocabulary of Afferent and Efferent, staying on the lookout for excuses to use them. One of my old BMC buddies is a huge fan of FindBugs and I know it's a good tool if the team is willing to react to it: that is, fix the bugs it finds. And thanks, Gregg, for the other pointers. Those are handy. James: thanks for the compliment!

By: James Governor

James Governor — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 03:40:25 +0000

oh yeah – I just wanted to comment on how your writing is coming along Cote. You were already good, but there is an economy and clarity of purpose coming into your writing that I can only envy.

By: James Governor

James Governor — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 03:37:37 +0000

come on Bill- you think we didn't ask about runtime/design time dependencies – what do you take us for? ;-)

the version mapping is a great question.

Seriously – this is all about design time at the moment. As Cote says, currently Lattix is an implementation of an idea-using system dependency maps in this way-but its very early days in terms of function. I started asking about CMDB and all sorts.

Thanks muchly for the OSS dependency pointers Bill and Gregg.

By: Gregg Sporar

Gregg Sporar — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 20:33:47 +0000

I have also had good results using JDepend. Another open source tool that I used was Dependency Finder. Two other open source tools that look similar but that I have not tried are Classycle and XRadar.

By: Bill de hOra

Bill de hOra — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 18:35:39 +0000

I would be asking questions about reflection, and run time v. build time dependency – ie, is the analysis entirely static and can it distingish between build and production dependencies*?

Can the tool analyse a code base for mismatched versions between developers? That is, where one developer is depending on v1.2.3 and another is using v1.3.2. This is/was a big deal in Java. Practically speaking if it can scan a BEA/JBoss/Websphere/JoNaS platform jars and reverse engineer the dependency constraints, that would be something.

"I could have sworn there are a handful of open source dependency inspectors"

In Java. I use JDepend a lot – it's primary value is that it uses Robert Martin's metrics for coupling/cohesiveness (more subtle and more useful than "thou shalt not").

"but there are many other code health issues that could use tooling"

Another tool is Findbugs – it analyses code for design smells, which is more general than dependency analysis – useful as the basis of a code review.

* if you look at the Hibernate distribution, they split the jar base for you along these lines. Ivy (the dependency manager extension to Ant) can also be used to declare build/test/runtime dependencies.