Jon Aquino's Mental Garden

Engineering beautiful software jon aquino labs | personal blog

Friday, July 02, 2004

Re: [jump-users] Doxygen for JTS/JUMP (was: Additional JTS Documentation)

> You may find the doxygen documentation for JTS/JUMP helpful in
> understanding the uses/is-used-by relationships among the
> classes of JTS and JUMP.

I wish there were a free Java visualization tool out there. Headway
and Visualize It look awesome, but unfortunately they're not free.
Creole is beautiful but is slow and has major bugs. ArgoUML is so slow
when I try to load big projects into it -- the import process takes
forever to complete. Fujaba is my favourite of the bunch, -- simple,
fast, and looks a lot like Together/J Whiteboard -- but it doesn't
import source directories recursively; plus its Spring Layout
algorithm is kind of buggy.

Walking home today, I had the idea of writing a program called Yet
Another Free Source Code Visualizer (YAFSCV). "Yet Another" is kind of
funny because there aren't many out there. Anyway, it would be written
in a scripting language (Groovy perhaps) and be really small (<500
lines I'm hoping). Most of the hard work would be done by JGraph
(panel, spring layout, etc.). And a cool thing is that it would be
language independent -- source files would be parsed with a couple of
*regular expressions*, so you could easily add new languages with a
10-line "ruby-rules.groovy" file. Or "csharp-rules.groovy",
"python-rules.groovy", "lisp-rules.groovy", "vb-rules.groovy", etc.

Kind of a neat personal project ... and probably more difficult that I
expect. But the basic idea is: a couple of regular-expressions to do
the parsing, and JGraph to do the display.

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