Demonstration of the Softvision Software Visualization Framework

When recovering and maintaining the architectures of software systems, effective visual presentations are essential for grasping the concepts and constructs involved. There exist several reverse engineering tools that provide visualizations of architectural information. The tools usually offer a set of views allowing interactive navigation of the architectural information in some predefined ways. However, one almost always needs to customize both presentation and exploration methods of the architectural models, according to their domain type, data size, and exploration goal. The SoftVision toolkit aims to provide this customizability via a modular design, in which all elements of the data exploration process are fully customizable by means of a scripting interface. This interface allows the creation of information processing procedures, and custom navigations, visualizations and user interfaces. In this way, several graphical layouts can be created and combined with interactive data viewers, to yield fully customized applications for exploration of software architectures.