The Design and Implementation of Composite Visualization Metaphor for DIVA (Debugging Information Visualization Assistant)

[[abstract]]With the growing of software scale and complexity, software debugging can be a real challenge。In order to making software development more efficiently, IDE is heading towards to software visualization field. Many researchers have tried to create usable software visualization tools but largely in vain. Most of them are limited in certain cases and never widely adopted. There are several reasons for the low adoption. The key reason, from our perspective, is the limited visualization browser (or visualization metaphor) provided by the tools. Many visualization tools can only display and render limited type of objects, including programs, data structures, and etc. To address this awkward situation, in this thesis we advocate a “compositionality“ principle. This means all visualization metaphors can be combined and assembled into a more complicated visualization metaphor, like basic build blocks. and design of visualization metaphor can be implemented by third parties. In this way, it is possible to create a best visualization metaphor to meet user’s need. After the amount of visualization metaphors exceeds a critical mess, tool usability can be greatly improved. To achieve this ambition, in this paper we designed a 3D visualization debugger system, DIVA (Debugging Information Visualization Assistant), which divide visualization tool and visualization metaphor into two parts. A new object-oriented framework is designed and implemented to achieve this goal. Based on this object-oriented design, visualization metaphor programming can be relieved from the details of visualization systems.