Friday, May 15, 2009

Architecture diagrams for open source projects

We had earlier posted an article on static code analysis done be Coverity Scan. Now, there is even more interesting stuff that they have for us!

Coverity Scan has recently released the Architecture Library - A collection of architecture data files, and directory and file relationship diagrams for over 2,500 open source software projects, all released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Here is the Press Release text.

This is nice and will help the developer community to study the successful projects and learn from the architecture. For a beginner it is often difficult to understand the code layout and structure. Coverity’s architecture library will definitely be handy as it has clear component level details of most of the known projects.

Each of the architecture diagrams in the Library have been generated using Coverity Architecture Analyzer. The tool uses information gathered during the build of a codebase to create a comprehensive list of interdependencies in the code. These dependencies can be investigated interactively with the Architecture Analyzer desktop application. It can also be used to generate diagrams like the one shown on the right.

This diagram shows a version of the Apache webserver, displayed at the directory level, with all dependencies between files rolled up into the file’s directory. Some minor directories have been omitted to simplify the diagram.

apache-minimal

Source: Coverity Scan Site.

The full collection of diagrams for a wide variety of C and C++ open source projects can be browsed By Category or By Name.

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