After long long hibernation, a new major feature release of APIviz has been released.

APIviz is a JavaDoc doclet which extends the Java standard doclet. It generates comprehensive UML-like class and package diagrams for quick understanding of the overall API structure. Click here for a real world example.

The most notable addition to 1.3.0 is the -category option contributed by Brad Sneade. If a class or a package is categorized by the ‘apiviz.category’ tag, it will be nicely painted with fill- and line- color. The fill- and line- color can be specified as Javadoc command line options (-category).

Besides this great addition:

• the look of the generated diagrams has been tweaked here and there to make them look more compact.
• much more useful diagnosis is printed out when Graphviz cannot be located.
• Graphviz home directory can be specified in a system environment variable – GRAPHVIZ_HOME.
• a bug where a certain version of Graphviz is not recognized has been fixed.

I’d like to thank Brad for the high quality patch and his patience with the long-awaited commit access approval to the JBoss.org SVN repository. Go Brad! 🙂