3.0 Roadmap

[Mike Nereson]

OK, lets lay out a road map for 3.0. I have a few things that I want to see put into it, and I'd also like to hear what you want in it.

== org.architecturerules ==

First. The big change is the groupId which is finally going to be moved to org.architecturerules for the core project and the maven plugin. I don't have the domain yet. I have a fund rasier page  where I was hoping to get about $30 to secure the domain for 3 years. So far no contributions : \ Maybe if any of your work for a company that uses the project, and the company has donated money in the past, you could ask your boss for a small $30 contribution to this project. Regardless, we'll get it eventually and the project needs to get off of com.* and the maven plugin needs to be the same groupId.

== architecture-rules-ant ==

I want to refactor the architecturerules.ant package to its own jar so that:

• User's who want to use the ant interface and include this jar.
• By including the jar, you get the Ant jars and dependencies. If you don't use Ant, you don't need the jar or the ant libraries.
• As we add new functionality to architecture rules someone else could take on the task of keeping the ant task up to date on their own schedule.
• This module also acts as an example of how to extend the core project.
• Allows us to develop new ant features and fix ant issues without doing a major release of the core. There are a couple of open ant-related issues in the issue list.
  

The downsides is that the API is broken, but I think that is OK given in the release  the packages are all changing to org.architecturerules so the API will be broken anyway.

== Issue 59: DependencyConstraintException should report the violating class ==

This is sort of a tough issue. We utilize jDepend which only looks at packages. However, Mykola brought Classycle to my attention (which I included on the alternatives page) which looks at class dependencies rather than package dependencies. We could move off of jDepend and switch over to using Classclye to find dependencies, or we could continue to use jDpend, and when a rule is broken, we can jump over to Classycle to figure out which class is breaking the rule. Another benefit to Classclye is that it is able to detect static dependencies which jDpend is not. I actually got an email from SonarJ, a commercial competitor listed on the alternatives page who congratulated us on developing a good open source architecture risk mitigating project but pointed out that jDepend could not detect static dependencies. I think in the long term we need to support detecting static dependencies so this Classycle might have been an important find.

Looking to get involved? We're looking for contributors for this task.

== Issue 60: XML reports ==

The only other current issue that I would like to tackle somehow is the output of the XML reports. I sent out a pretty detailed email on this to the user and dev mailing list. I got little response. I put a copy of the email in the issue which includes a prototype for the XML output. The premise would be that the execution of architecture rules results in the output of an XML file that describes all of the rules, the packages that were investigated because of that rule, the dependencies of each package that match that rule, and a list of each violation. One major change would be that instead of throwing an exception when a rule is broken, the rest of the packages would be investigated first and then the XML output is written, and then an exception could be thrown describing all of the rules that were broken - not just the first rule.

The reason for this XML output is two-fold: first, it provides output for other developers to start processing and developing new tools for which could be good for this project. second: it provides a data source for our maven 2 plugin to use to generate a site report for. Or this could be a new project: maven-architecture-rules-report-plugin. Either way, this is a good stepping stone to new functionality and growth for this project.

Looking to get involved? We're looking for contributors for this task.

== FindBugs ==

We added the FindBugs report recently to the maven-generated site. We should be able to clear this list for all of our code.

== Remove 3rd party org packages ==

I had created an Issue to remove unneccessary dependencies to cut down on the number of libraries that we depended on. But I think this was implemented poorly to the point where it caused a reported bug. Also, we have a pseudo maven repository so that makes this issue almost moot.



This list encompasses most of the open issues in the issue tracker that I want to see implemented. There are a couple of issues that I am going to leave on hold (such as inverting the project to expect the user to define the accepted packages rather than the exceptional packages) and some that I can not fix with out money (continuous integration server).

All of these tasks are up for discussion. And most any of them are open to user contributions. If you are interested in taking on one of these tasks, just reply to this email, tell us what you want to work on, what questions you have, and maybe describe how you plan on implementing it. If its a small task, you can submit a patch, if its bigger, we can make you a contributor (for a short term or longer term depending on circumstances)


And while I have your attention, Mykola has released a 0.0-SNAPSHOT of the maven 2 plugin. Has anyone tried it yet? Anyone want to try it out?

Thanks everyone.

http://72miles.com/architecturerules (and someday architecturerules.org)

~ Mike Nereson
~ Architecture Rules Project Lead