[Springframework-developer] Architecture of Spring

[Ivica A. <iv...@gm...>]

Dear Spring developers,

my name is Ivica Aracic, I am a PhD assistant at the Darmstadt 
University of Technology.
My research is concerned with the question how graph-based software 
visualizations can facilitate reasoning about software architectures. In 
the context of this work I have analyzed architectures of prefuse 
(http://prefuse.org/), jedit (jedit.org), and spring.

Except of spring all of these projects had some more or less bad 
dependecy cycles at the architectural level, making the comprehension 
difficult. However, after analyzing spring I was surprised that there 
was not a single cycle at all in the dependency graph at the 
architectural level (see screenshot). So my question is, how do you 
ensure this property in your development process. Are you using metric 
tools or some other tools to regulary check dependencies at the 
architectural level?

Screenshot: http://www.bytelords.de/public/spring-architecture.jpg

Best Regards,
    Ivica Aracic