I downloaded the 1.3Mb jar, did the usual magic invocation java -jar pasta.jar and pointed it at some source of mine. It does a load of analysis and comes up with a rather pretty dependancy diagram, with all the classes/methods with no dependancies of their own at the bottom, and then other classes neatly layered on top based on their dependancies until the top of the diagram you can see the classes with no dependant classes.

click to enlarge screenshot

If you look closer at the diagram, you can see that an 'acyclic dependancies principle' metric is being applied at the time, which basically means if you have arrows pointing up and down the diagram from/to any one class, then it is a bad thing. Which winds up saying my 'Cal' class smells bad.

The 'acyclic dependancies principle' or ADP is one of many metrics which you can find out more detail of in this pdf (A bit in depth really)

I like the simplicity of Pasta, things that smell bad are coloured in red, almost identical to the performance guides that JProbe gives me.

It then goes onto give this detail as to what offending dependancies it has, in this manner:

From "BlogState" to "Cal"
From	To	Dependency Type	Line
BlogState.getCalendar	Cal	return type	131
BlogState.setCalendar.c	Cal	parameter type	135
BlogState.calendar	Cal	field type	185
From "Cal" to "BlogState"
From	To	Dependency Type	Line
Cal.setCurrentDate.state	BlogState	parameter type	61
Cal.setCurrentDate.state	BlogState	parameter type	67
Cal.setCurrentDate.state	BlogState	parameter type	76
Cal.populateDays	BlogState.getEntries	method call	204
Cal.populateDays	BlogState.getEntries	method call	205
Cal.populateDays.state	BlogState	parameter type	164