Bevel README

Bevel is a tool that helps you understand legacy or highly complex codebases using code visualizations and static code analysis.

Overview

Bevel transforms complex codebases into interactive documentation and visualizations through comprehensive static analysis, helping developers understand code structure and relationships.

Features

Interactive Code Visualization

• Automatically generate call graphs and sequence diagrams based on static code analysis
• Navigate code structures through interactive visualizations
• Explore dependencies, class hierarchies, and function relationships
• CodeLens integration for quick function visualization

AI-Powered Business Context Extraction

• Extract business logic and domain knowledge from codebases
• Generate documentation and explanations for complex code
• Transform technical implementations into business terminology
• Connect code artifacts to business requirements and objectives

Knowledge Graph Creation with REST API

• Build comprehensive knowledge graphs representing code relationships through deterministic parsing
• Access generated graphs through a REST API for integration with other tools

The way to access these should be configured in the config file.

Supported Languages

Bevel supports a wide range of programming languages for static analysis and visualization, including:

• COBOL
• Java
• JavaScript/TypeScript
• Python
• C#
• C/C++
• Kotlin
• Ruby

The language support is extensible through a straightforward configuration process. To add support for a new language:

1. Install the appropriate language parser extension in VS Code
2. Update the Bevel configuration file (allowedFileExtensions.json) to register the language

This way you can configure the tool adapt to any programming language supported by VS Code.

Usage

After installing Bevel, you can:

1. Analyze your project using the "Bevel: Re-/Analyze Project" command
2. Extract business context for files or functions
3. Generate visualizations with "Call Graph" command in codelens.
4. Use Bevel Chat (powered by Cline!) to ask questions or request modifications to your codebase

Feedback and Support

Email juan@bevel.software for any issues, happy to answer ASAP!

Release Notes

1.0.0

First public release of Bevel

1.1.0

Added call graphs (sequence diagram) as an experimental feature

1.1.2

Fixed issue in Linux, where JDK would keep on downloading in a loop

1.2.0

Updated onboarding flow, fixed some issues related to the Bevel API. You can now more easily interact with the api in javascript and typescript using our npm library

1.2.1

Added option to export graph to neo4j from the localhost:1645 OpenAPI interface.

Sequence diagrams now work better with COBOL.