JarAnalyzer on Spring OSGi

I took the liberty of running JarAnalyzer on the OSGi bundles deployed as part of Spring 2.5.6. These are the JAR files found in the /dist/modules directory. Click the image at right to reveal the relationships between JAR files.

It’s interesting to see the dependency relationships and layering of the framework. Note that there are no cycles. I have always felt a significant advantage of Spring is the way development teams can incrementally adopt the framework. Start using core for basic dependency injection and move up the stack to JDBC and declarative transactions, ORM integration, and integration with your favorite web framework. It’s the flexible architecture of Spring that allows this. I’m guessing that when the Spring team went about modularizing the framework around OSGi, the architectural flexibility already embodied in previous versions of Spring made their job easier.

For those of you who want the more detailed information, you can view the JarAnalyzer html report for Spring 2.5.6 showing a variety of metrics related to design quality.

Comments