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: J ava I nteractive V isualization E nvironment. 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.

Visualizing program execution using user abstractions

“…Jinsight collects traces from Java programs and uses this data to provide a variety of displays that can be used to understand performance issues, class and object interactions, and memory utilization problems such as memory leaks. Among many other examples are [7,[9][10][11]15,41,42] and our own work with Cacti [30] and BLOOM [31][32][33].…”

Visual monitoring of process runs: An application study for stored procedures

“…UML sequence diagrams [8] are a standardized way to encode object activity and dynamic dependencies: objects are visualized as linked bars on a vertical timeline. Although being intended to be a modeling tool, these diagrams can be also applied to visualize recorded interaction data of objects [20] or web services [14]. Zinsight [11,12] applies a similar technique to operating system events, organizing them by time, type, and project space in a sequence-diagram-like main view; additional views can be used to retrieve color-and space-encoded timing information.…”

Plagiarism Detection for Java Programs without Source Codes

“…The call-tree is resilient to alterations in variable names and intramethod details, including statement reordering and control structure equivalences, as long as the calling structure is not altered. In order to construct the call-tree structure of a Java program, we obtain an execution trace of the program with the aid of a state-of-the-art dynamic analysis and visualization tool for Java, called JIVE (for Java Interactive Visualization Environment) 8,11,17,20 .…”