Mirko Stocker

I’ve always been a huge fan of Wordle, so when I saw Fabian Steeg’s announcement of Cloudio – the SWT-based tag cloud visualization for Zest – I knew I wanted to do something with it, so I created Sourcecloud (suggestions for a better name are welcome).

Sourcecloud is an Eclipse plug-in that lets you create tag clouds of your source code. The idea for this project came from Kevlin Henney, who used such tag clouds in a presentation at Jazoon 2010 (if I remember correctly). Luckily for me, Cloudio comes with an example application, from which I was able to reuse most of the parts, so all the credits go to Cloudio’s creator Stephan Schwiebert.

Why would you want to make tag clouds for source code? It can give you a quick first impression of the quality of a code base. Ideally, you should see many names of the project’s domain. On the other hand, if you see lots of nulls, ints and Strings, chances are that the code will be hard to understand because there are not many domain specific types in it.

You can install Sourcecloud from the update site for integration builds into Eclipse Indigo. And here’s how the result looks:

And here’s a screenshot of the Eclipse view:

The source code is on GitHub, so if you want to add or change something, fork it and send me a pull request!