Headway’s soon-to-be-announced, new release of Structure101 has one basic additional capability – it let’s you regularly “publish” (“save” to you and me) the structure of one or more projects in a central location (called a “repository”). Not such a Big Deal you might think, but it spins off a surprising number of ways to get more out of the product.
First thing you get is a web application that web-enables the repository. More importantly it structure-enables the generalists (anyone that doesn’t even know where to start looking for the code). The size and excessive complexity of all the projects in my empire can be seen, compared and tracked in the comfort of my own web browser. Architects can see immediately if the architecture has been broken and encourage the relevant IDE-jockey to go unbreak it.
Said jockey then fires up the Structure101 Client, loads the same structural data from the same repository, quickly discovers the structural changes (they’re color-coded on the dependency graphs) and uses the familiar rich-client functionality to figure out which code-level references are causing the rogue architecture-level dependencies, and how he’s going to reverse them out.
And there’s all the other boring stuff like centralized complexity thresholds, support for distributed projects, access control, etc. All in all, this is a major increment that I have no hesitation in heartily recommending you buy several of.
2 Comments
Joe
Chris,
Will you generate an RSS feed that I can use to track changes to the code base?
Chris
That would be cool all right 😉 and in the spirit of “exception” notification. We used email for this in a prototype and its on the “list”, but rss is clearly an alternative.