JArchitect 4.0

Last year around the same time I checked out JArchitect for the first time. I concluded that JArchitect was a useful, but also an ugly companion. Lucky for me, I got the chance to check out the new big version of JArchitect, which was really a giant step forward in terms of usability.

As a Mac user you might love to hear that JArchitect is now behaving native. No more X11 things, no more hassle. You’d open a app file from your programs folder, and something which even reminds a bit on XCode would open.

Old friends like the powerful CQLinq are still there, but today they look more integrated to the tool. The problems reported are accurate as usual and easy to spot.

Also the reports were fully overhauled. They look nice and you can quickly navigate through it. As images say more than words, I created a report output for Apache Log4j 2:

Download JArchitect 4 Report Sample

As a new feature, JArchitect is now able to run PMD, Checkstyle, CPD or Findbugs reports as well. Combined with the Trendcharts it convinced me that JArchitect became a tool with which I want to work on daily basis now.

Just for the record, I did experience two crashes. I didn’t consider this problematic as I was working quite a while when they happened. After such a big update it would be surprising if everything was perfect in the first version.

The team definitely did something right. Today it seems to be important to have a nice UI. Building Software itself is already a complex task’ modern developers don’t have the time or the interest in dealing with even more complexity when using tools. The JArchitect team seem to understand this and spent a lot of effort in improving the look and feel. It’s definitely worth to check JArchitect 4.0.