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For Untangling Java, Structure 101 Makes Headway


By Jennifer deJong
September 15, 2006 — 
Is your code too fat? Is it tangled? If so, it’s likely that your application is difficult to maintain, test and reuse.

Headway Software aims to address those problems with Structure 101, a tool for analyzing dependencies in Java code. The company was expected to announce earlier this month version 2.0, adding “a richer set of features with which to understand the structure of your code,” said Chris Chedgey, founder and chief technology officer of Headway.

Every developer starts out with a mental model of how an application is structured, he noted. But it’s easy to deviate from the intended design, inadvertently creating unnecessary code dependencies. The result is an application with a “structural complexity that sucks the life out of development,” he said. “Everything uses everything, and everything clashes when you do integration builds.”

That results in “fat,” where classes or packages (groups of classes) are too big, or “tangles,” which occur when so many packages depend on one another that the code is difficult to understand, said Chedgey.

Structure 101 2.0, which starts at US$499 per developer, offers new ways to hone in on those flaws. It allows developers to examine code structure by looking at individual “slices,” instead of simply browsing through the complete, hierarchical view offered in the previous version, said Chedgey. A slice might include all of the application’s classes, or all of its packages, for example.

Also new is a matrix view, which depicts dependencies in rows and columns, and the use of tags, which “let developers mark a tangle in a slice” and then switch to a hierarchical view to see how the tangle impacts the rest of the code, he said. “With 2.0, you can consider the code at whatever the level of abstraction you choose.”

Structure 101 analyzes only Java code today. But Headway plans to support Ada, C/C++ and .NET, and expects to offer an Eclipse plug-in, said Chedgey.


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