Sourcetrail was a
FOSS
Fos or FOSS may refer to:
Companies
* Foss A/S, a Danish analytical instrument company
*Foss Brewery, a former brewery in Oslo, Norway
* Foss Maritime, a tugboat and shipping company
Historic houses
*Foss House (New Brighton, Minnesota), United ...
source code
In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comment (computer programming), comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a Computer program, p ...
explorer that provided interactive dependency graphs and support for multiple programming languages including
C,
C++,
Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...
and
Python.
History
The project was started by Eberhard Gräther after an internship at
Google
Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
where he worked on
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macO ...
, and noticed that he consumed a lot of time (1 month) to implement a simple feature that he expected to be done in 1–2 hours. This was his motivation to develop a tool that helps in understanding the consequences of source code modifications. The project started as a commercial project in 2016 under the name Coati. In November 2019, Sourcetrail was released as open-source software under version three of the
GNU General Public License
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user
In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...
.
The project was discontinued in 2021.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20211115131149/https://www.sourcetrail.com/blog/discontinue_sourcetrail/ Blog post on discontinuing Sourcetrail.]
Concept
Most of a programmer's time is invested in reading the source code. Therefore, Sourcetrail is intended to help the developers to understand the source code and the relationship between different components. Sourcetrail builds a dependency graph after indexing the source code files and provides a graphical overview of the source code.
It is built in an extendable way, so it could be extended to support more programming languages.
See also
*
Software visualization
Software visualization or software visualisation refers to the visualization of information of and related to software systems—either the architecture of its source code or metrics of their runtime behavior—and their development process by mea ...
References
External links
*
Visualization software
Static program analysis tools
Software metrics
Infographics
Software maintenance
Software development
Software quality
Source code
Discontinued software
{{programming-software-stub