Plugging-in visualization: experiences integrating a visualization tool with Eclipse

ABSTRACT

The Eclipse platform presents an opportunity to openly collaborate and share visualization tools amongst the research community and with developers. In this paper, we present our own experiences of "plugging-in" our visualization tool, SHriMP Views, into this environment. The Eclipse platform's Java Development Tools (JDT) and CVS plug-ins provide us with invaluable information on software artifacts relieving us from the burden of creating this functionality from scratch. This allows us to focus our efforts on the quality of our visualizations and, as our tool is now part of a full-featured Java IDE, gives us greater opportunities to evaluate our visualizations. The integration process required us to re-think some of our tool's architecture, strengthening its ability to be plugged into other environments. We step through a real-life scenario, using our newly integrated tool to aid us in merging of two branches of source code. Finally we detail some of the issues we have encountered in this integration and provide recommendations for other developers of visualization tools considering integration with the Eclipse platform.

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INDEX TERMS

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors, Management

Keywords:
configuration management and version control, integration, software development environment, software visualization