Industries

Overview and Challenges

Traditionally, software engineering applications have been written to address the analysis and manipulation of program structure. Reverse engineering functions usually generate extremely large control flow diagrams. Forward engineering functions focus on the inverse process where software architecture designers define class structure, inheritance relations and associations diagrammatically with state charts and use-case diagrams.

The software engineering industry has standardized on the Unified Modeling Language (UML) specification for software system design. Forward engineering generates code from the UML software design specification. UML utilizes specialized diagrammatic techniques that were developed by Rational Software. Many view UML as a complex diagramming specification that is difficult and expensive to support. This has left significant opportunities for companies to develop better UML diagramming systems. Tom Sawyer Software licenses its diagramming software to a number of these companies.

Tom Sawyer Software Solutions

In the reverse engineering sector, Tom Sawyer is the only company whose component technology products have the appropriate scalability. In recognition of this, companies such as Intel, Sun Microsystems, Cyrano, Metrowerks, and SAP have licensed Tom Sawyer's technology.

Tom Sawyer's hierarchical layout technology can scale to display thousands of nodes and edges in each diagram, visualizing the structure of very large software programs. The company has also developed technologies that allow for the folding and hiding of selected objects. Our software also supports incremental layout technology so that users can maintain perspective as large diagrams are explored. The software detects cycles that represent recursive function calls and provides valuable visualization support to make sense of the complex structures of large software projects.

Compact drawing of classes and their relationships adeptly calculated with Tom Sawyer's orthogonal layout algorithm.

Further, because these diagrams can be so large, the company is continuously developing its comprehensive technologies to visualize large graphs. Its diagram display engine products support rapid object selection mechanisms, zooming, overview windows and multipage printing of very large diagrams. Its display engines support double-buffered redraw so that graphics throughput is optimized for live thread analysis and graphical profiling applications.