BeanDoc is the tool that facilitates documentation and graphing of Spring bean factories and application context files. Though very easy to use, it is designed to be flexible and extensible to meet most needs.
Latest version of the project is 0.8.1
BeanDoc can help you visualize better the layers of your application and how your objects interact. It can be added to your normal project build processes so that your documentation and object graphs are always up to date with your releases and snapshots!
For a full sample of BeanDoc's output, see the following documentation from two of Spring's sample applications:
In order to get the graphs, you will need an installation of GraphViz for your platform (not supplied by this distribution, but highly recommended).
The latest version can be obtained using the link below:
If you use maven, there is a Maven2 plugin for beandoc available from codehaus. BeanDoc has a repository available at http://spring-beandoc.sourceforge.net/repo/
The project is presently moving from the main springframework project to one of its own. You should be reading about beandoc from spring-beandoc.sourceforge.net and accessing code via subversion, not CVS.
0.8.1 was recently (6/Nov/07) released which is the first version to properly support Spring 2.x namespaces. The binary release should also work properly for most users too which means you no longer need to build from source and fiddle around with batch files/shell scripts and paths :)
BeanDoc cannot correctly figure out contexts which use auto-wiring. Nor can it distinguish scoped beans (other than the original prototype/singleton).
The next release is intended to be a 1.0 once we have some feedback on the current version. If BeanDoc is something you're interested in, or something you've looked at before, we'd urge you to download and try it (again) and let us know what you think.
Project documentation is normally regenerated on a per-release basis. Links are shown on the left to the available reports and reference docs.