Title
Visualizing the Structure of Object-Oriented Systems
Abstract
Executing object-oriented programs have a complex structure consisting of numerous objects connected by inter-object references. This structure, called the program's object graph, is hard to understand, and this complicates learning, teaching, debugging and maintaining object-oriented programs. While visualisation can be used to display object graphs, the size and complexity of typical object graphs also makes visualisation difficult. We have developed ownership trees as simple yet powerful method of extracting a program's implicit encapsulation structure from its object graph. We present a program visualisation tool that makes use of ownership trees to display the structure of object-oriented programs. Our prototype implementation suggests that visualizations based on ownership trees can effectively display the structure of fifty to sixty objects in a program simultaneously.
Year
DOI
Venue
2000
10.1109/VL.2000.874383
VL
Keywords
Field
DocType
inter-object reference,program visualisation tool,complex structure,object graph,object-oriented systems,powerful method,numerous object,typical object graph,object-oriented program,implicit encapsulation structure,ownership tree,teaching,object oriented programming,tree data structures,encapsulation,navigation,displays,tree graphs,visualization,software maintenance,debugging,power method,topology
Programming language,Tree (graph theory),Object-oriented programming,Visualization,Object graph,Computer science,Tree (data structure),Software maintenance,Interobject,Debugging
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1049-2615
0-7695-0840-5
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.41
5
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Trent Hill120.41
James Noble21683163.52
John Potter328950.46