analyzing maven dependencies with UML tools

Maven is very good in managing dependencies in large projects with many different artifacts, but unfortunately maven doesn't provide an easy way to visualize and analyze these dependencies. The dependency report that comes by default with a maven generated web site provides some information, but it is textual only and it only provides information about outgoing dependencies: it tells you what artifacts project X depends on, but not what other projects depend on project X.

Some maven dependency visualization tools exist. The best I could find is the dependency analyzer from jfrog. It's a standalone java application that allows you to open a pom.xml file and graphically explore its dependencies in a swing GUI. It does however not provide advanced analyzing tools, its merely a visualization tool.

Existing UML modeling tools (e.g. magicdraw) typically allow you to do much more advanced kinds of analyzes on dependency and other UML diagrams. They also allow you to represent dependencies in different ways (as a diagram, as a matrix, ...). Why not use the power of these tools to analyze maven dependencies?

maven xmi plugin

In this blog entry, I present a maven plug in that generates an XMI model from a pom.xml file and it's dependencies. XMI is an XML standard most commonly used to represent UML models. Most professional modeling tools can read XMI files. The XMI itself is not directly a visualization of the dependencies, but with a decent modeling tool, all kinds of fancy visualizations are possible.

To give you an idea, this screen shot (click to enlarge) shows a diagram created with magicdraw for the dependencies of the xmi maven plugin itself.

using the maven xmi plugin

First, you'll have to check out the code of the xmi-plugin from subversion:

svn checkout http://xmi-plugin.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ xmi-plugin

Then you can install the xmi-plugin in your local maven repository, by invoking "mvn install" in the checkout directory. Now you are ready to use the plugin on your favorite maven project. Simply run

mvn xmi:xmi

in the root directory of your project (where the pom.xml file is located). The resulting XMI model will be generated in the target directory of your project, with the name ${artifactid}-${version}.xmi. You can now start analyzing the XMI model in an UML tool.

more information

The xmi-plugin is hosted on google code, for more information go to http://code.google.com/p/xmi-plugin/.