Lattix tackles software architecture complexity

Looking to salve complexity in enterprise software environments, Lattix on Thursday is announcing an upgrade to its software architecture management system, extending it to databases and Web services.

The Lattix LDM 3.0 (Lightweight Dependency Models) product visualizes complex enterprise software systems architectures. Key to the product is its capability of gauging interdependencies between different pieces of software. Lattix leverages a “Dependency Structure Matrix” approach that uses dependencies to build a blueprint of mission-critical software applications.

With LDM, companies can improve quality and lower costs through more effective development, Lattix said. Architecture governance is provided to specify an architecture and detect violations during development. Units of software are represented as classes, with each possessing functionality such as an order or a product, said Neeraj Sangal, president and founder of Lattix.

Lattix’s approach is superior to technologies such as UML (Unified Modeling Language) in tackling software complexity, Sangal said in an e-mail.

“Specifically, the current approaches such as UML are too detailed, and quite useful at that level, but fail at a bigger picture level because of inadequate high-level abstraction mechanisms combined with a visual representation that doesn’t scale,” Sangal said.

In version 3.0, LDM spans databases, Web services, and applications. Users can, for example, find out which applications would be affected by changing a stored procedure in the database.

Database modeling functionality in version 3.0 applies only to Oracle databases. Lattix expects to add capabilities for other databases such as Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2 in the future. Dependency models can be captured between database schemas, tables, stored procedures, and triggers.

A user of LDM 3.0 said he is using the product to eliminate redundancies in an Oracle database and examine object behaviors.

“We’re trying to normalize one database that’s going to be about 30 million to 100 million records,” said user David Bell, staff programmer for the state of California in Sacramento.

Lattix LDM uses modules to parse files built around Java, C/C++, Oracle or the Hibernate object-relational mapping tool. Dependencies are represented via use of these modules. New in version 3.0 is a general-purpose LDI (Lattix Data Import) module that represents a user’s specific Web services dependencies. LDI is an XML specification for loading dependency information from different languages, configuration files, and proprietary tools.

The product is effective at addressing complexity in software architectures, Bell said. “It gives me a bird’s eye view of the data and a lot of its complexities in one shot, which I really like,” he said.

Lattix LDM depicts the structure of an application, including relationships between software assets, said analyst Steve McClure, research vice president for application development software at IDC. Subroutines and individual utilities are accounted for as well.

“This is a two-dimensional approach that allows you to isolate the interrelationships,” McClure said.

Web-based reporting of architectural metrics, violations, and incremental changes is featured in LDM.

Lattix LDM 3.0 is shipping now. The Enterprise Edition, which gauges an unlimited number of classes or files, is priced at $2,995.