This is a tool to generate Word Clouds from source code, such as the following:
This word cloud shows the 100 most recent words of the hibernate-core project.
The idea for Cloudserver is based on a talk by Kevlin Henney. Word clouds of code can give some insight on the priorities of a project. Hibernate obviously cares a lot about null-Objects, deals with many Strings and has something to do with transactions.
Cloudserver is quick, easy and offline way to generate such clouds. Previous tools, like wordle work online. If you are not comfortable with uploading all your source to a website, Cloudserver is a viable alternative.
Cloudserver is based on an idea by Kevlin Henney. The implementation uses node.js to process the files and d3-cloud by Jason Davies to generate the clouds. d3-cloud is a layout plugin for the data manipulation library d3
Cloudserver requires node.js to be installed. On OS X, this can be achieved via brew. Just run
brew install node
Cloudserver uses the async module, which can be installed via
npm install async
Since cloudserver is written in CoffeeScript, this has to installed as well. CoffeeScript is also available via brew:
brew install coffee-script
The cloudserver requires at least two arguments.
- The language configuration to use
- The directories where it should search for sources
Currently, there are only two language configurations available. Java with (java) and Java without common keywords (javaNoKey).
The above Cloud was generated via
./cloudserver.coffee javaNoKey <pathToHibernateSources>
After processing the sources, the cloudserver opens a webserver on port 4242 and the cloud can be accessed on http://localhost:4242/
The generated html accepts the requestParameter limit to configure the number of words to show. By default cloudserver shows the 100 most common words. http://localhost:4242?limit=25 would only show the 25 most common words.
The output can be further configured in the file webroot/cloud.html. For more information refere to the documentation of d3-cloud and d3.
The language-specific configuration has to be in a file called languageName.languageConfig.js. See java.languageConfig.js for a documented example of all the possible configurations.
Other global configurations, like the server port can be manipulated at the top of cloudserver.coffee directly.