Methodology and architecture of JIVE

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.

REFERENCES

• 1: Hiralal Agrawal , Richard A. Demillo , Eugene H. Spafford, Debugging with dynamic slicing and backtracking, Software—Practice & Experience, v.23 n.6, p.589-616, June 1993 [doi>10.1002/spe.4380230603]
• 2: Balzer, R. M. 1969. Exdams: Extendable debugging and monitoring system. In Proc. AFIPS, AFIPS Press, Montvale, N. J., vol. 34, 567--580.
• 3: Michael R. Birch , Christopher M. Boroni , Frances W. Goosey , Samuel D. Patton , David K. Poole , Craig M. Pratt , Rockford J. Ross, DYNALAB: a dynamic computer science laboratory infrastructure featuring program animation (abstract), Proceedings of the twenty-sixth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, p.29-33, March 02-04, 1995, Nashville, Tennessee, United States
• 4: Grady Booch , James Rumbaugh , Ivar Jacobson, The Unified Modeling Language user guide, Addison Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Redwood City, CA, 1999
• 5: Brown, M. H., and Sedgewick, R. 1985. Techniques for algorithm animation. IEEE Software (January), 28--39.
• 6: Zhenqiang Chen , Baowen Xu, Slicing object-oriented java programs, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.36 n.4, p.33-40, April 1, 2001 [doi>10.1145/375431.375418]
• 7: Coffman, Jr., E. G., and Graham, R. L. 1972. Optimal scheduling for two-processor systems. Acta Informatica 1, 3, 200--213.
• 8: R. F. Cohen , G. Di Battista , R. Tamassia , I. G. Tollis , P. Bertolazzi, A framework for dynamic graph drawing, Proceedings of the eighth annual symposium on Computational geometry, p.261-270, June 10-12, 1992, Berlin, Germany [doi>10.1145/142675.142728]
• 9: Wim De Pauw , Richard Helm , Doug Kimelman , John Vlissides, Visualizing the behavior of object-oriented systems, Proceedings of the eighth annual conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, p.326-337, September 26-October 01, 1993, Washington, D.C., United States
• 10: De Pauw, W., Mitchell, N., Robillard, M., Sevitsky, G., and Srinivasan, H. 2001. Drive-by analysis of running programs. Tech. rep., IBM T. J. Watson Research Center.
• 11: Eades, P., Di Battista, G., Tamassia, R., and Tollis, I. G. 1999. Graph Drawing: Algorithms for the Visualisation of Graphs. Prentice-Hall, New Jersey.
• 12: Erich Gamma , Richard Helm , Ralph Johnson , John Vlissides, Design patterns: elements of reusable object-oriented software, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1995
• 13: Paul Gestwicki , Bharat Jayaraman, Interactive Visualization of Java Programs, Proceedings of the IEEE 2002 Symposia on Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments (HCC'02), p.226, September 03-06, 2002
• 14: Paul V. Gestwicki , Bharat Jayaraman, JIVE: java interactive visualization environment, Companion to the 19th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications, October 24-28, 2004, Vancouver, BC, CANADA [doi>10.1145/1028664.1028762]
• 15: Adele Goldberg, SMALLTALK-80: the interactive programming environment, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1984
• 16: James Gosling , Bill Joy , Guy Steele , Gilad Bracha, Java Language Specification, Second Edition: The Java Series, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 2000
• 17: David Grove , Greg DeFouw , Jeffrey Dean , Craig Chambers, Call graph construction in object-oriented languages, Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.108-124, October 05-09, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
• 18: T. Dean Hendrix , James H. Cross, II , Larry A. Barowski, An extensible framework for providing dynamic data structure visualizations in a lightweight IDE, Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, March 03-07, 2004, Norfolk, Virginia, USA
• 19: Bharat Jayaraman , Charlotte M. Baltus, Visualizing Program Execution, Proceedings of the 1996 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, p.30, September 03-06, 1996
• 20: John B. Johnston, The contour model of block structured processes, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.6 n.2, February 1971 [doi>10.1145/1115880.1115883]
• 21: Michael Kölling , John Rosenberg, Guidelines for teaching object orientation with Java, Proceedings of the 6th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, p.33-36, June 2001, Canterbury, United Kingdom
• 22: Jan Lönnberg , Ari Korhonen , Lauri Malmi, MVT: a system for visual testing of software, Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces, May 25-28, 2004, Gallipoli, Italy [doi>10.1145/989863.989931]
• 23: Sven Moen, Drawing Dynamic Trees, IEEE Software, v.7 n.4, p.21-28, July 1990 [doi>10.1109/52.56447]
• 24: Sougata Mukherjea , John T. Stasko, Toward visual debugging: integrating algorithm animation capabilities within a source-level debugger, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.1 n.3, p.215-244, Sept. 1994 [doi>10.1145/196699.196702]
• 25: Stephen C. North, Incremental Layout in DynaDAG, Proceedings of the Symposium on Graph Drawing, p.409-418, September 20-22, 1995
• 26: Alex Potanin , James Noble , Robert Biddle, Snapshot Query-Based Debugging, Proceedings of the 2004 Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC'04), p.251, April 13-16, 2004
• 27: Steven P. Reiss, An overview of BLOOM, Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT workshop on Program analysis for software tools and engineering, p.2-5, June 2001, Snowbird, Utah, United States [doi>10.1145/379605.379629]
• 28: Steven P. Reiss, Visualizing Java in action, Proceedings of the 2003 ACM symposium on Software visualization, June 11-13, 2003, San Diego, California [doi>10.1145/774833.774842]
• 29: Tamar Richner , Stéphane Ducasse, Recovering High-Level Views of Object-Oriented Applications from Static and Dynamic Information, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, p.13, August 30-September 03, 1999
• 30: Tamar Richner , Stephane Ducasse , Roel Wuyts, Understanding Object-Oriented Programs through Declaratice Event Analysis, Workshop ion on Object-Oriented Technology, p.78-79, July 20-24, 1998
• 31: Kathy Ryall , Joe Marks , Stuart Shieber, An interactive constraint-based system for drawing graphs, Proceedings of the 10th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, p.97-104, October 14-17, 1997, Banff, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/263407.263521]
• 32: David Ungar , Randall B. Smith, Self: The power of simplicity, Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications, p.227-242, October 04-08, 1987, Orlando, Florida, United States
• 33: Robert J. Walker , Gail C. Murphy , Bjorn Freeman-Benson , Darin Wright , Darin Swanson , Jeremy Isaak, Visualizing dynamic software system information through high-level models, Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, p.271-283, October 18-22, 1998, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• 34: M. V. Zelkowitz, Reversible execution, Communications of the ACM, v.16 n.9, p.566, Sept. 1973 [doi>10.1145/362342.362360]
• 35: Andreas Zeller , Dorothea Lütkehaus, DDD—a free graphical front-end for UNIX debuggers, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.31 n.1, p.22-27, Jan. 1996 [doi>10.1145/249094.249108]