Eclipse Plug-in Dependency Visualization

When developing Eclipse-based software consisting of a large set of plug-ins it is a good idea to keep track of the dependencies between the individual plug-ins.
There is an Eclipse Incubation project that makes it possible to visualize the directly and indirectly referenced plug-ins of a selected plug-in:
PDE Incubator Dependency Visualization

When I gave the plug-in a try I missed two things:

• I also wanted to show the incoming dependencies
• I wanted to be able to exclude the Eclipse plug-ins
  

Basically, I wanted to show the complete dependency graph of all my plug-ins. The simplest solution I could think of was to

• Add a checkbox to also show the incoming dependencies of the plug-ins
• Provide a text field to define exclude filter patterns

So I checked out the source code and tweaked it a little. Now it is possible to show the whole dependency graph for all my plug-ins by selecting a plug-in which is directly or indirectly referenced by all other plug-ins.

Here is what the result looks like:

You can download a binary version of the modified plug-in here.

To get started, hit CTRL-3, type Graph and select the Graph Plug-in Dependencies View. To show the dependencies of a plug-in right-klick on the view and select Focus On...

[Update 26.05.2009] By now, the PDE Incubator Dependency Visualization provides the option to also show the incoming dependencies via a new toolbar action "Show Callers". (see also Bugzilla 206306)

Please observe my most recent post on this topic.