Home    Program    Housing & Transportation    Registration    Submissions    Wiki    Maps

Interactive Visualization of Object-Oriented Programs

Paul Gestwicki, University at Buffalo

This research is motivated by the need to obtain better comprehension of the execution of object-oriented programs. We describe a novel approach to runtime visualization of object-oriented programs. We focus specifically on Java since it has been widely adopted by industry and academia. Our visualization methodology features:

1. visualizations of execution state using a custom notation that clarifies the important fact that objects are environments of execution;
2. visualizations of program history using dynamically-generated, interactive sequence diagrams;
3. forward and reverse execution;
4. support for visual queries regarding object, variable, and method behavior during program execution, the results of which are integrated into the object and sequence diagrams;
5. advanced drawing capabilities driven by a combination of source code and runtime analysis; and
6. the use of standard Java compilers and virtual machines.

Our approach is realized in a prototypical software tool, JIVE: Java Interactive Visualization Environment. JIVE is useful as a pedagogic tool and as a visual debugger, and its notations provide a visual operational semantics for Java.

KEYWORDS: program visualization, object-oriented programming, object and sequence diagrams, interactive reverse execution, Java