Visualizing Spring Dependencies

Over the last couple of months, I have been playing with Kotlin in my spare time. To get a better feel for the language, I decided to implement a small program that reads through a POM file and diagrams all of its dependencies using Graphviz and dot.

With the exception of one, the dependencies in the images below only include Spring dependencies (com.springframework.*, io.spring.*). The “unfiltered” example below is included only to show what this looks like. This has helped me better visualize how the various projects reference each other. For example, these diagrams changed how I thought the Spring IO Platform was used. Instead of having projects like Spring Boot align with a specific version of the Spring IO Platform, you can see from the diagram below that Spring Boot drives the Spring IO Platform.

As you can imagine, I now have a whole new appreciation for the shenanigans that maven/gradle need to go through to derive dependencies.

Note: Click the images below for a larger version.

Legend:

• Fill Color
  • Green - This node is where the graph starts
  • Orange - This is a regular Project Object Model (POM) file
  • Blue - This is a Bill of Materials (BOM) file
• Arrows
  • Solid Line, Open Arrow - This arrow points to a given POM files parent
  • Dashed Line, Solid Arrow - This arrow indicates a “dependency” relationship
  • Dotted Line, Inverse Arrow - This arrow indicates that a POM was imported into the Dependency Management section of another POM
• Label
  • Normal Text Label - This indicates the POM’s artifactId
  • [Bracketed Text Label] - If this artifactId is dependency managed, this value indicates where this is specified

Spring IO Platform

spring-boot-starter-parent

spring-boot-starter-web

spring-boot-starter-web (unfiltered)

Spring Cloud

Spring Cloud Netflix

Spring Framework