Visualize Maven parent and module POM hirarchies

Ingomar Otter — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:32:38 +0000

Here’s a little tool I wrote while reviewing a client’s fairly complex project:

Pom Grapher generates a graph from multi-module and parent-child relationships of Maven projects (POMs).

My use-case was to understand the POMs relations in order to understand the build.
It produces a graphic representation of the modules (nodes) and parent project and sub-module relations (edges) using GraphViz.
Here is a (tiny) excerpt from Apache Geronimo:

black edges indicate module relation, orange edges indicate parent project relations.

This is intended for understanding POM structures, not artifact dependencies.

It can be found over at source.valtech.com.

Bigger rules, bigger screens

Ingomar Otter — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 20:23:55 +0000

In current project where we are working on a vehicle configurator based on an inference (rule) engine, a client known by the affectionate name of OGO shared an particular SVG document wiht me. Using the swiss army chainsaw of structure visualization -graphviz- he created a diagram showings the engine’s traversal through the solution space. Think: ‘I tried this then I tried that, which didn’t work either, went back two steps tried this other thing..’ – resulting in a pretty impressive tree.

So impressive that I immediatly wanted a huge printout for show-off purposes.

In order to be able to split the diagram into multiple pieces I made the navice mistake to convert it to a bitmap. Which was 528452 x 2900 pixels at a moderate resolution of 90 dpi.

Gist: I need a bigger screen. A much bigger screen. I estimate that a 594″ will do.

Let’s see what WWDC can do for me tonoght.

Ingomar Otter » visualisation

Visualize Maven parent and module POM hirarchies

Bigger rules, bigger screens