Structure101 v2 goes beta today. With it you can walk through the code-base in slices from the class-level, to the package-level and up through the design levels, spotting tangles and seeing how far they have spread. This is a snag … Read More
Deconstructing Software
Gartner 2006 Technology Hype Cycle
The Gartner “Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle” is something worth giving a good once-over every year. The premise is that most technologies that eventually get traction will first go through a “Peak of Inflated Expectations” with lots of publicity and a … Read More
Struts more twisted than Spring
The structure of Struts is characterized by a nasty dependency tangle that starts at the class-level and percolates up through the package and design-levels. Following my blog on Spring’s “almost perfect” structure, I thought I’d take a look at another … Read More
“Tangles” rather than “Cycles”
I’ve been asked recently why I talk about "tangles" rather than "cycles" in the context of cyclic dependencies. The reason is clear when you look at a graph that contains a "strongly connected component" (a tangle): This graph contains … Read More
Spring’s Structure is “almost perfect”
Keith Donald reports that Spring’s architecture contains not a single dependency cycle. I’ve looked at the structure of many open source projects and generally found them riddled with dependency tangles (junit is an exception – perhaps unsurprising given its small … Read More
More on M.C. Escher and software projects
This is for Paddy and Paul who are having trouble with the principle of design “emergence” and didn’t really get my blog on Eschers “Hands”. Luckily Escher also predicted other software design processes. Guys, do either of these feel more … Read More
Structure101 for Java Build 58b
This build fixes a problem with the transformation feature whereby the resulting structural model was incorrect for some regular expression sequences.
M.C. Esher and Emergent Design
Kevin Kelly gave a talk to the Long Now Foundation called “The Next 100 Years of Science: Long-term Trends in the Scientific Method”. He talks about recursion and emergence from complexity and mentioned Escher’s “Drawing Hands”. Is this the perfect … Read More