Interactive Visualization of Large Structured Development Environment

Interactive Visualization of Large Structured Development Environment Project Update – Nov 16 2005

By Anirban Sinha (Ani)

Project update presentation - 16th Nov 2005

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Problem

Large software projects can get really complicated specially when large number of modules are added & integrated together.

It would be really helpful if we can develop a tool to visualize structures & method call sequences within the source codes using interactive trees.


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Proposed Solution – Original Plan Use Prefuse Infovis toolkit to visualize

program structures written in C as graphical models & add interactions.

To compensate for large complicated graphical structures for large projects, we add zooming & panning facilities.

For static analysis of code, I originally planned to use my previously designed code parser & add some modifications to it when required.


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Progress so far …

Configured Prefuse to work in eclipse.

Front end structure has been designed to load a file & display graphical visualization.


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Snapshots …


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Snapshot Continued …


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A look at milestones …

Week 1

(10 HRS)Establish familiarity with the Prefuse Toolkit.

Week 2

(15 HRS)Try out the animated graph with a dummy adjacency matrix

Possibly miscalculated/unanticipated milestones?? True. – it definitely needs revision.


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Challenges So far/Diversions from Original Proposal … Soon, realization dawned in that designing a

static analyzer for C source code is in itself a large project.

Started looking for open source (so that I could tweak & port them with Prefuse), possibly cross platform & eclipse configurable analyzers.

Did not get any effective tools that analyze C codes, but got one that analyses exception flow control in Java codes - Jex.


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Jex - A Tool for Analyzing Exception Flow in Java Programs http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mrobilla/jex/ Originally designed by Martin P. Robillard

during his masters research @ UBC. He is currently a faculty at McGill.

Analyzes the flow of exceptions in Java programs.

Is open source, written in Java & eclipse configurable.

Produces analysis results in text files which can be visualized.


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Current Work/Future Directions … Currently working on to run Jex on UNIX

system & run it on a sample java file & observe its output (having some CLASSPATH error).

Future work will mostly be concerned with tweaking Jex to produce output file compatible with Prefuse & tweaking Prefuse toolkit to bring about effective visualization of the exception flow structure.

Need to talk to Chris and/or Gail Murphy for further insights.


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References consulted so far … Prawn: An Interactive Tool for Software

Visualization, Andrew Chan, Reid Holmes. Pathfinder: exposing the mental map of

program navigation , Mik Kersten (beatmik-at-acm.org), CS 533C Visualization Project, March 1 2004.

Martin Robillard ([email protected]). The Aristotle Project

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/aristotle (got this reference from Martin).

Interactive Visualization of Large Structured Development Environment

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