Program visualisation in an open distributed environment

Developing distributed systems is a complex task. Even more complex is to explain to other people how a particular distributed system works. Until recently such systems could only be demonstrated by means of scrolling text windows accompanied by pictures that explained the architecture of the system. Program visualisation can help a lot in gaining more insight in how such systems work, more than scrolling text and static pictures. In this thesis we answer the question of how to visualise applications in open distributed environments. In our approach we developed a generic method for visualising distributed applications and applied this method to CORBA systems.