An extensible tool for visualizing Java classes

As the catchy subtitle claims, viztool is used to generate visualizations of collections of Java classes. These visualizations are intended to be printed out and taped to the wall or set on the desk beside you or folded into paper airplanes and sailed around the room. Thus viztool does not include a sophisticated user interface for viewing these presentations onscreen, although you can actually display them on the screen because the rendering is done via the Java 2D rendering engine.

viztool was born from my repeated desire to be able to glance over all of the myriad classes that come to be involved in any large project. I knew I could go out and pay thousands of dollars for a single user license for some object oriented design tool that would diagram my classes three ways to Sunday, generate code, count my chickens and make toast on the side, but I couldn't find a free, simple tool for generating basic class diagrams.

Building viztool

Build viztool (and install into your local repository) with Maven like so:

% mvn install

Using viztool

viztool can be used from Ant or Maven or invoked manually on the command line.

Maven

See the Viztool Maven plugin for instructions on using Viztool in a Maven project.

Ant

For Ant, add a task like the following to your build.xml file:

<!-- using the Maven Ant task -->
<target name="hierviz">
  <artifact:dependencies pathId="viztool.classpath">
    <dependency groupId="com.samskivert" artifactId="viztool" version="1.2"/>
  </artifact:dependencies>
  <taskdef name="viztool" classname="com.samskivert.viztool.DriverTask"
           classpathref="viztool.classpath"/>
  <viztool pkgroot="com.samskivert.viztool" classes="com.samskivert.viztool.*"
           visualizer="com.samskivert.viztool.hierarchy.HierarchyVisualizer">
    <classpath refid="your_classpath"/>
  </viztool>
</target>

<!-- using manual dependencies -->
<target name="hierviz">
  <taskdef name="viztool" classname="com.samskivert.viztool.DriverTask">
    <classpath>
      <fileset dir="somewhere" include="viztool*.jar"/>
      <fileset dir="somewhere" include="samskivert*.jar"/>
    </classpath>
  </taskdef>
  <viztool pkgroot="com.samskivert.viztool" classes="com.samskivert.viztool.*"
           visualizer="com.samskivert.viztool.hierarchy.HierarchyVisualizer">
    <classpath refid="your_classpath"/>
  </viztool>
</target>

the parameters passed to the task are:

• pkgroot: the base package name which will be used to strip common text from the front of fully qualified class names
• classes: a regular expression matching the classes to be visualized
• visualizer: the classname of the visualizer to use

the <viztool> element should contain a <classpath> element which defines the classpath over which viztool will iterate, searching for classes that match the specified pattern.

Manual invocation

There is also an included shell script (bin/viztool). Add the classes that you wish to visualize to your CLASSPATH environment variable and then invoke the viztool script with the package prefix you wish to visualize.

For example:

% export CLASSPATH=<here>/foo.jar:<there>/bar.jar:<everywhere>/baz.jar
% ./bin/viztool --print com.whoever.mygreatpackage

Because the classes are actually resolved by the JVM when visualizing, all classes that the visualized classes depend upon must also be loadable (meaning included in the class path).

If you want to write your own script, take a look at the viztool script to see what arguments to pass to the visualization driver class.

Distribution

viztool is released under the BSD license. The most recent version of the code is available here: http://github.com/samskivert/viztool/