Interactive Visualization for OSGi-based Projects

Big software projects often use architectural frameworks for a consistent structure. OSGi is such a framework to create modular Java applications. The architecture of individual projects, however, is often hidden in configuration files. We propose to visualize projects in a modular framework such as OSGi with an approach to allow users to comprehend the connections within a system. We assist this comprehension using filtering and automatically generated, interactive views of the project. We extend the notion of interactive views with a concept to reproduce configured views for arbitrary system revisions to enhance up-to-date documentation. We have implemented this proposal in the publicly available KIELER project, and have validated it with a large software project in the railway domain.