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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You want to add some validation logic to your Java beans? You want to achieve this with some shiny extendable annotations? Then give the Java Bean Validation standard aka JSR-303 a try..

We’re going to use the reference implementation for bean validation, Hibernate Validator in this tutorial but there are also links to other alternatives like Oval or Apache Bean Validation.

So let’s begin and validate some stuff ..
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