Latest News
January 14, 2010
New Sotoarc/Sotograph Release 4.0
Visualization of Structures and Relationships
Sotoarc visualizes the structure of a software system on flexibly selectable abstraction levels. This gives an architect the opportunity to quickly gain an overview of the top-level structure as well as to investigate the underlying structures and dependencies.
Sotoarc operates on models of the source code (code models). These are extracted by a parser and stored into an integrated database. A code model is an abstraction of the corresponding software system. It is structured into files and logical packages which are cross-linked by their syntactical dependencies. Logical packages are automatically generated from Java packages, C# namespaces or directories.
Sotoarc makes it possible to flexibly modify the displayed abstraction level by zooming in and out of the code model tree. This enables the architect to investigate very large software systems on different abstraction levels without ever losing the context of the overall structure. While browsing with Sotoarc, it is always possible to drill down to the source code at the base of the visual abstraction.
Sotoarc's focusing technology provides the means to avoid getting lost in a flood of information by zooming in to more detailed abstraction levels. It is possible to group structures that are far apart in the code model into a local context. This is a prerequisite for investigating aspects of the code model in detail. For example, it is possible to set a focus and display only those files which are involved in an architecture violation between two layers.
