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.

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A variety of different tools exists to help us analyze RESTful web-services and create documentations for their APIs in different formats.

In the following tutorial I’d like to demonstrate how to document an existing JAX-RS web-service in multiple formats like Swagger, AsciiDoc or Plain Text using Maven, the JAX-RS Analyzer and the JAX-RS Analyzer Maven Plugin.

The JAX-RS Analyzer gathers its information not only by reflection like most other tools but also by bytecode analysis and therefore does not require us to add special annotations for documentation to our code.

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