After listening to several talks about preventing architecture erosion while at EclipseCon 2011, I decided to reinstall the PDE Incubator Dependency Visualizer plugin. One of the common problems I’ve run into with bundles, is the mixture of UI and Core dependencies. I’m in the middle of some pretty big clean up effort for the Turmeric SOA eclipse plugins. Below is a snapshot of Turmeric’s core and it’s dependencies.
Visualizing your plugins dependencies is pretty simple. Just install the incubator project, and then open the Graph Plug-In Dependencies view. Click the Search icon and locate the plugin you want to visualize. It’ll give you a simple view like above. You can then navigate around and locate those places where you may have some bad dependencies.
So far using the plugin, I’ve been able to eliminate some unneeded dependencies, and also find a few places where I though the core and ui dependencies were clean, but actually were not.
You may want to try stan4j for plugin dependency visualization.
See http://blog.stan4j.com/2009/12/project-and-bundle-dependency-graphs.html