Proceedings of the ACM 2005 Symposium on Software Visualization (SoftVis 2005)
, pp. 95-104, St. Louis, Missouri, USA, May 14-15, 2005
Published by the Association for Computing Machinery, ISBN 1-59593-073-6

See listing in the ACM Guide to Computing Literature

Abstract:
A novel approach to the runtime visualization and analysis of object-oriented programs is presented and illustrated through a prototype system called JIVE: Java Interactive Visualization Environment. The main contributions of JIVE are: multiple concurrent representations of program state and execution history; support for forward and reverse execution; and graphical queries over program execution. This model facilitates program understanding and interactive debugging. Our visualization of runtime states clarifies the important point that objects are environments of execution. The history of object interaction is displayed via sequence diagrams, and in this way we help close the loop between design-time and run-time representations. Interactive execution is made possible by maintaining a runtime history database, which may be queried for information on variable behavior, method executions, and object interactions. We illustrate the capabilities of this system through examples. JIVE is implemented using the Java Platform Debugger Architecture and supports the Java language and libraries, including multithreaded and GUI applications.

Cited by:

• Steven P. Reiss in Visualizng program execution using user abstractions published in Proceedings of SoftVis '06
• J. Bohnet and J. Dollner in Analyzing feature implementation by visual exploration of architecturally-embedded call-graphs published in Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Dynamic systems analysis
• C. Demetrescu and I. Finocchi in data-driven graphical toolkit for software visualization published in Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Software visualization