A lot of features are already included in the Neo4j graph database system but sometimes we want to extends its capabilities and implement functions and procedures by ourselves that we may reuse.

In the following tutorial I will demonstrate how to implement a procedure for Neo4j, how to write and run tests using JUnit and an embedded graph database and last but not least how to setup Neo4j with Docker and our stored procedure installed in no time.

(more…)

I have written about other software system analyzing and validation tools before but today I would like to introduce a new tool named jqAssistant that supports software architects, developers and analysts in a variety of tasks like analyzing given structures, validating architectural or quality constraints and generating reports.

Therefore jqAssistant analyzes given projects or artifacts and stores the gathered information – that is enriched by a variety of existing plugin-ins – in a Neo4j graph database.

This graph database may now be used to enforce architectural constraints or specific code metrics, to generate reports or to analyze a system with a nice browser interface.

In this tutorial I’m going to show how to integrate jqAssistant in an existing project using Maven as build-tool, how to explore an existing system step-by-step and finally how to enforce specific metrics by writing them down as a kind of living documentation in an AsciiDoc document.

I have also started to write down basic Cypher (the query language used) queries to analyze a system and other queries to gather basic metrics.

(more…)