README.md

In benjaminschwetz/Rchitecture: Rchitectural description

Rchitecture

This package is my report for the architectural recovery assignment on the Software Architecture course at ITU in Spring 2021. The purpose is to recover meaningful views from a software project. I went with the default example, the Zeeguu-Api for analysis.

Approach and dependencies

After some initial struggles with parsing the python AST trees in R I settled on the following :

• kavon/yaml-ast and maligree/python-ast-explorer for parsing python AST into data structures.
• 📦reticulate for calling those python scripts from R
• 📦data.tree for parsing yaml (and directories) into data.tree objects that could then be converted into igraph objects
• 📦igraph behind the scenes and for implementations of different graph algorithms
• 📦tidygraph for a tidy interface to manipulate the graphs
• 📦ggraph for plotting graphs

Furthermore, I am using 📦tidyverse for most of the data manipulation and additional plotting. The documentation website is built using 📦pkgdown.

Reproduction

You can install this package from github. R dependencies should be installed automatically for reproducing what worked out. For dependencies for things that didn’t work out and python, some debugging might be required. Please ask :)

remotes::install_github("benjaminschwetz/Rchitecture")

Example: Zeeguu Api

For the assignment, I made some summary and a dependency view. They are in vignette(zeeguu_api, package = "Rchitecture)

What didn’t work

• ❌ Using the structure of the ast tree. Not sure if it is my lack of python knowledge or lack of tree wrangling skills but I didn’t find a good way to use the tree for anything, except splitting the script code into tokens. I killed a lot of time with this.
• ❌ Simplifying the graph using edgebundling from shochastics/edgebundle. I think my graph was too messy. for the algorithm. see edgebundling_failed(). Depends on datashader (python) package.

What I didn’t have time for in the end

• ⏱️ Making a graph of external dependencies. I started parsing out the requirements.txt but didn’t have time to generate a separate graph viz for it. See generate_dependency_graph()
• ⏱ Refactor code. A lot of stuff could be reused,/ is copy pasted across funtions right now.
• ⏱ Parameterize the notebook: give it a github path and autogenerate the viz.

benjaminschwetz/Rchitecture documentation built on Dec. 19, 2021, 8:42 a.m.