I have to say I think Byecycle is a very promising project. I have
tried STAN4J, ispace, jdepend and metrics eclipse plugin for
visualizing depedencies in eclipse.

Now, STAN4J is commercial and very good. Easy to use, intuitive.
Easily wins in the ease-of-use department. ispace is awesome, it is
like STAN4J only better, but also a bit more work to use. Jdepends and
metrics are really not comparable to the others in my opinion, JDepend
does not have a graphical view of things, and the metrics one is not
very good.

I have been running these on a fairly large codebase (700kloc) and I
have to say byecycle is the one that shines here, simply because it
doesn't try to pull everything in at once. It is also of course a
downside, since I cannot see the overall picture in enough detail
always: ispace can "drill down" on either side of a dependency, all
the way down to method level! That is simply awesome.

So, the two problematic areas in byecycle is firstly detail-level,
drilling-down ability. Secondly it is the fact that the graph layout
algorithm is not very good. It is decent, but not good. I've tried
both 0.1 and SVN, and can hardly see a difference. There are two sub-
problems here, too: First is that I do NOT want to wait for an
algorithm to layout stuff. Please, I have better things to do. I would
like to either see the graph layout being done before viewing, with a
progress-bar or atleast much more coarsely in the beginning. The
second problem is that the graps are often very tangled, and I simply
want to move a node to "help" the algorithm along. Metrics plugin
actually allows this to some degree and it sometimes produces better
graphs.

I've seen the problem with scrollbars, and I don't know SWT so can't
really help there. To be honest, I think scrolling is overrated for
these kind of things. Adjusting the number of nodes and layout to fit
the window would be a very much cooler idea. ;)

Hopefully I will be able to contribute atleast something in the
future, but don't hold your breath :)

---
John Bäckstrand

Hey! Thanks for the feedback.

I comment below...

My idea is to replace eclipse's package explorer entirely. You would
start off seeing a graph with all your projects and their
inter-dependencies. You would then be able to drill down to package,
class and method level. This is not really a big deal to build, just
some more visiting in Eclipse's Abstract Syntax Tree.

With that in place, it makes sense to remove the external package
dependencies that show up in byecycle, removing A LOT of clutter from
the diagrams.

Can be easily done. Its a line of code to comment.

Can be easily done.

Adjust the number of nodes? How?

Many very easy and cool things to do in byecycle.

I am focusing my efforts on Sneer, the sovereign computing platform,
though. Let us know when you're ready to help.

See you, Klaus.