Many may ask "There exists so many analysis tools for Java out there, so why should I bother?". We agree, that is a sensible question to ask. Below we try to tell you why using the XRadar might give you an extra edge.
As mentioned in Motivation , our inspiration came from the plethora of brilliant and free open source analysis frameworks that have been appearing the last few years. But one problem is that these do a brilliant job of analysing specific aspects of the system, but do not show the whole picture. Furthermore, there exists a lot of table based reports based on system package structure, but very few graphical analysis tools. A final lack is that these tools show the current picture, but do not show how that picture has evolved. As mentioned, we believe this view is crucial if you are going to make decisions on the measurements.
Maven partly solves this problem, by making it easy to run analysis on tools and presenting these one after another in the reports section. Maven also does a brilliant job of easily setting up the analysis. But, we believe Maven in its current state does not fill our needs in terms of a coherent drilldown-view, graphical reports, cross-project analysis and finally and most important - the dynamic picture. Hence, we have made the multiproject xradar maven plugin to fill this gap.
Some commercial tools cover many of these aspects, while maybe not all, but they are definately not free!