Introduction

Tag clouds visualize the frequency of use of words within a given set of texts. Usually they are used to give the visitor of a web site an impression of what the web site is about.

The use of tag clouds is not limited to web sites. Any text document or set of text documents can benefit of this visualization. The goal of applying domain driven design to software development is to make the code more expressive. This expressiveness can be checked or demonstrated by tag clouds.

We heard of this technique on a keynote by Kevlin Henney on the OOP 2011 which referred to Phillip Calçado's article Tag Clouds: See How Noisy Your Code Is.

Purpose of smartics-tagcloud

This project provides an integration of tag clouds to visualize the key concepts found in the source code into a Maven build process. The tagcloud-maven-plugin allows to integrate a tag cloud of the project's source code in the site documentation. It also allows to export a simple XML report on the tag cloud information.