Question

I am thinking about a DSL / domain design to analyse a big bunch of maven dependencies.

Input is a list of poms (effectively a map between poms and physical location), which I think will be parsed as “flat” (i.e. non-recursive) files to some nice scala type like this:

class Artifact(
  val groupId : String, 
  val artifactId : String, 
  val version : String
)

class Module(
  val id : Artifact,
  val location : URI, // any good type for this ?
  val parent : Option(Artifact),
  val modules : List(Artifact),
  val dependencies : List(Artifact)
)

Then there are three structures on that “nodes”

1. inheritance: by <parent> and <modules>
2. dependencies: by <dependency>
3. physical: filesystem / svn dir-layout

Question: How should these be designed?

Some possibilities in my mind:

1. Impose structure on modules them selves, e.g. by making the list of dependencies mutable, and change its type to List(Either(Artifact,Module)).
2. Reuse collection API, and map inheritance tree to Tree(Module). But what with the dependency graph ?
3. Design completely new structures and map the list of poms onto this
4. Others? …

Of course, I want to have as much information as possible in the data-structure to avoid repeated calculations. Outline is:

1. parse list of flat files
2. enrich to structure (either by structure update (mutable) or mapping to a different structure (immutable/functional).
3. query rich structure.

Things I want to do with this:

• find incoming dependencies
• find “clusters”
• find relations of nth grade
• give refactoring hints (pull-up dependencies, merge modules)
• render pom.xml as html, browse to related artifacts. (similar to http://jarvana.com)

Thanks for any insights …

Answer 1

Just for the records, I will instantiate new structures, based on immutable collections (trees and scalax.graph http://www.assembla.com/spaces/scala-graph/wiki ).

For the browsing of poms, I will render them to xhtml, injecting links for dependencies/inheritance, probably based on play-framework.

And if this project will ever produce something useful, I will post it here …