[Soot-list] Structure of Soot (OO Design)

[Hayden Melton]

Hi all,


I’m a PhD student at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. As part of my
research I am doing empirical studies on a corpus of Java applications looking
at their (OO) design. If you are a developer of Soot you might be interested in
the metrics I have collected on it. They are available as graphs here:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~hayden/junitEvolution.htm

There’s an explanation of what the graphs mean on my research page:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~hayden/research.htm

Briefly, there are a lot of classes in Soot involved in a big (compilation)
dependency cycle (or to use the graph-theory term: strongly connected
component). I think this is bad, though it’s only one aspect of the quality of
a design. Other applications like ArgoUML and Azureus have exhibited this large
SCC characteristic too. As a result of my contact with the Azureus developers
they have begun refactoring Azureus.

In any case, check it out if you’re interested in the design of Soot; or OO
Design and metrics in general.

/
Hayden Melton