Friday, August 22, 2008

BarCampManila

Nap Ramirez on visual analysis in 3D of java projects using relief

The first BarCamp in Manila, and the first BarCamp I attended. For me, it's great being in these kinds of gatherings because I get to see old pals, meet new friends and talk about interesting stuff. I demonstrated Relief, an application that generates a 3d visualization of a Java project. Relief displays the entire project in a 3d space, where packages and classes are represented as boxes and interfaces are spheres. The relationships between entities are colored lines, while the orbits describe the degree of coupling. This kind of visualization can help developers understand complex Java projects by giving a high level view of everything they are working on.

Here's a screenshot of Relief in action:
Relief Screenshot

Relief requires a configuration file that describes the Java project it will render. It'll be too much of a bother to hand-edit it, so I came up with a Maven2 plugin that does the dirty work for me. I call it com.napramirez.maven.plugins:relief-maven-plugin:1.0 (Relief Maven Plugin for short), but it still isn't available in the public domain. Just contact me if you're interested, or bug me to release the code to the public.

For more stuff about the event, please visit BarCampManila1.
More photos in Flickr.
Recorded videos are available at ustream.tv.

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