This article will explain how to maximize the benefits of using Sonargraph in day to day development operations. One major benefit is to stop and reverse architectural decay, but Sonargraph can also help to limit complexity and find actual problems in the code.
Read MoreCategory: Scripting
Implementing Additional Metrics Using the Sonargraph Script API
With the Sonargraph 9.10 release, we added support for two additional OO-metrics “Depth of Inheritance” and “Number of Children” as described by Chidamber and Kemerer. Sonargraph provides a powerful Script API that allows implementing new metrics as Groovy scripts and I needed surprisingly little amount of code for the implementation. This blog post will explain the scripts’ code and the used Sonargraph Script API in detail.
Read MoreAutomatic Detection of Singletons
Today, we released a new version of Sonargraph with an improved script to find Singletons. “Singleton” is one of the design patterns described by the “Gang of Four” [1]. It represents an object that should only exist once.
There are a couple of pros and cons for a Singleton that I won’t go into detail in this blog post. For anyone interested, I recommend “Item 3: Enforce a singleton property with a private constructor or an enum type” in “Effective Java”, written by Joshua Bloch [2]. Two interesting links that came up during a quick internet research are listed as references [3] [4]. Let’s just summarize that it is important to ensure that Singletons are properly implemented to avoid bad surprises (a.k.a bugs) in your software. And you should keep an eye on the existing Singletons and check that they are not misused as global variables.
This blog post describes, how you can detect Singletons by utilizing the Groovy scripting functionality of Sonargraph.
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Finding Distributed Packages/Namespaces with the Sonargraph Scripting Engine
Today I will show how to make use of a very powerful, yet underutilized capability of Sonargraph-Architect. By writing simple Groovy scripts you are able to create your own code checkers or define your own metrics. Many of our most useful scripts are just about 50 lines of code and therefore not a big effort to create. As an example we will develop a script that finds packages (Java) or name spaces (C#, C++) that occur in more than one module.
The scripting engine of Sonargraph is based on our scripting API. Most scripts are based on the visitor pattern. Using this pattern a script can traverse specific elements of Sonargraph’s software system model, which is basically a very big tree data structure. At the root there is the software system node, which is accessible by a globally available instance of class CoreAccess, called “coreAccess”. This specific instance is language agnostic, i.e. it can be used for scripts that support all programming languages supported by Sonargraph. When creating a script you decide wether it will be language specific or language agnostic. Language specific scripts have access to more detailed language specific data and will use different root objects like “javaAccess” or “csharpAccess”.
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