The newest release comes with a bunch of new features and usability improvements:

• SonarJ is now able to locate duplicate code blocks with a very efficient high-performance algorithm. This will help you to avoid problems caused by copy & paste programming.
• New package level refactorings make our virtual refactoring engine even more powerful. Most virtual refactorings can be easily delegated to Eclipse for execution.
• The classes and sources analyzed by the Eclipse plugin can now be managed much more flexible, so that SonarJ can work effectively even if your project is only opened partially.

Please check our release notes for a full list of enhancements and improvements.

An updated version of our Sonar plugin will follow within the next couple of days.

There are various improvements over all the Soto tool components. Some of them are:
Sotoarc's architecture modeling concept works more fine-grained. Besides whole packages it is now possible to assign single source files to architecture modules. This makes it possible to split the content of packages/namespaces/directories architecturally without being forced to do any package restructuring. The Sotoarc cycle analysis feature has been enhanced and the GUI has been made more intuitive, in many respects. A main enhancement is the ability to receive an immediate graphical feedback when cutting a set of dependencies which leads to a break up of dependency cycles.
The Sotoarc checking engine now scales to larger projects and the Sotoarc GUI has been streamlined in many aspects. Java annotations are now detected by the Soto Java parser, stored in the Soto repository and can be analyzed via a set of predefined metrics. The analysis of C/C++ code with respect to template specific references has been improved. There is also a new, comfortable tool integrated which collects all the built data (Include paths, Defines) which are required for a precise C/C++ parsing.
Sotoarc/Sotograph customers will receive the new release as a part of their valid maintenance service.

Today we released the first version of our plugin for Sonar. Sonar is an umbrella tool for many different aspects of code quality. It comes with plugins for CheckStyle, Cobertura, FindBugs, PMD and other popular code analysis tools. The SonarJ plugin is the first plugin for Sonar that allows to check architectural and structural aspects of your project. These aspects have the biggest impact on testability, maintainability and comprehensibility of your code.

If you use the plugin with our free structure analysis license it will provide useful metrics that measure the structural debt and the level of cyclic package dependencies in your project.

If you already have a license for SonarJ-Report the plugin will provide more metrics and add Sonar violations for all architecture violations, threshold violations and open tasks. Have a look at the plugin documentation if you want to know more.

The new release comes with a couple of major new features and improvements. Moreover 5.0 was the first release where our customers directly influenced our development schedule and task list by using the product feedback forum on our website.

The following features and improvements have been implemented:

• Support for the Spring Framework is now built into SonarJ. SonarJ is able to recognize dependencies defined in Spring Configuration files. This was a feature heavily pushed by our user community.
• Revolutionary visualization and breakup tool for cyclic dependencies. Now you are able to visualize all cyclic dependencies in your system. The breakup analyzer computes all possible breakup sets, so that you can untangle your code with the least possible effort.
• Our Eclipse plugin can now reload modified architecture descriptions automatically. This was also a feature requested by our users.
• Comfortable many to one mappings from Eclipse projects SonarJ projects. This is especially useful when your project is split into many smaller sub-projects.
• The performance of the parser has been improved dramatically. Moreover the memory consumption of SonarJ has been reduced. A new option allows you to skip source file parsing. This is very helpful when you want to analyze systems with more than 30,000 classes.
• Completely new metrics view with histograms and pie charts.

You can try the new release for free by either requesting an evaluation license or make use of our free community license. The community license is limited to projects with up to 50,000 byte code instructions (approx. 20,000 lines of code).

hello2morrow GmbH (Germany) and hello2morrow Inc. (USA), now offer their software analysis tool set Sotoarc/Sotograph also for ABAP and ABAP Objects. This is the first tool for easily checking architectural structures of SAP R3 programs. The new product has been developed jointly with our partner C1 WPS GmbH (Germany). C1 WPS is a specialist for software architecture, software architecture analysis and quality assurance. They provide comprehensive consulting and coaching in the areas of introducing and using Sotoarc and Sotograph (the range of Soto services offered by C1 WPS: http://www.c1-wps.de).

Sotoarc is the software analysis tool for software architects, technical project leads, and quality professionals. Using Sotoarc, they are able to

• visualize and understand the static structure of an existing software system
• model a prescribed architecture for the software system graphically
• detect architecture violations, i.e., deviations of the code structure from the prescribed architecture
• simulate restructurings of the software system for enhancing the structure without touching the source code

Sotoarc's graphical user interface allows to look at an ABAP software system on a very high abstraction level and to drill down to the concrete source code. With the integrated focusing technique it is possible to analyze the dependency structures even of very large ABAP systems. In Sotoarc, an architecture blueprint can be quickly and simply modeled with graphical means (drag&drop). Also complex architectures with nested modules and layers and with interfaces on different abstraction levels can be defined.

The tool automatically compares the architecture model with the implemented source code. All deviations are directly visible in the GUI on a high abstraction level and can be tracked down to their source code locations via zooming. Sotoarc also supports the user in the planning and simulation of source code restructurings. It is possible to simulate changes of the code structure in the Sotoarc GUI; the effects on the global architecture are immediately shown in the graphical view of the tool.

Sotograph additionally computes a large number of predefined metrics and provides queries for analyzing the system. Also duplicated code blocks and cyclic dependency structures are found. Sotograph can compare different versions of an ABAP system and highlights important modifications. In this way, quality requirements can be monitored continuously and with small effort even for systems that are developed elsewhere. The continuous monitoring and comparison of new versions can be automated via batch scripts.

Sotoarc and Sotograph are also available for systems written in Java, C# or C/C++.

For more information on Sotoarc/Sotograph for ABAP, please contact info@hello2morrow.com (phone: +49-89 548479-41) or sotographie@c1-wps.de (phone: +49 40 51 32 26 82). Evaluation versions are also available from there.

Please have a look at our new product feedback facility on this website. If you log in you will notice two new feedback links on the left side. One click will bring you to a product specific feedback site, where you can enter your ideas of how to improve our products SonarJ and Sotoarc/Sotograph. You can also vote for ideas of other people, so that we can find out which ideas have the broadest support in our user community. So let us know, where you see room for improvement. Let us know, which features you are missing. Your feedback is valuable to us. If your idea score is amongst the three highest scores at 12pm EDT on July 17th 2009, we will send you a $60 Amazon gift card. Employees of hello2morrow are excluded from this competition.

The most interesting new feature is a new cycle breakup analyzer. This analyzer measures the cyclicity of a cycle group and computes sets of changes to break up a cycle group into several smaller cycle groups with lower cyclicity. If a user accepts one of the proposed change sets, a complete list of the refactorings needed to implement the change is generated. Another interesting new feature is the ability to inject “external” dependencies into Sotoarc’s dependency model by using an XML file. This feature is accompanied by an out of the box solution to inject the dependencies of a SpringFramework configuration into Sotoarc’s dependency model. Both features will also be included in SonarJ 4.2, which is scheduled for release later this summer. For C++ users of Sotoarc and Sotograph we have greatly simplified the setup of the parsing process. Now it can be completely configured over the UI. No more fiddling in obscure configuration files!

A major new feature is the ability to configure the layers accessible when you access one vertical slice from another. Previously this was restricted only by the rules put on layer dependencies. Now you can define a rule that only the “service” layer of a slice can be accessed by another slice. This is especially useful when designing Service Oriented Architectures. To our knowledge there is currently no other comparable product on the market that allows you to elegantly define these kinds of constraints. We also made our meta model far more flexible. You can now specify allowed and forbidden dependencies between different types of architectural artifacts. For example you could forbid the usage of a specific subsystem for a layer or allow only a certain subsystem within a layer to access a specific lower level layer. Since more flexibility also means more room for inconsistencies we also added a consistency check for the architecture model.