Visualisation of Concurrent and Object-Oriented Programs

Program visualisation can be defined as the application of graphical constructs to an algorithm or a program in order to visualise and understand its execution, methods, elements and purposes. It can be applied to a wide range of programming domains. It can also be used as a tool during program development. One such use is for understanding and debugging concurrent objectoriented programs. This paper describes Visor++, a tool for these purposes. It provides a coherent set of views that can easily be related back to the program being visualised. Furthermore, the tool is designed to have a looselycoupled architecture, which is relatively easy to change and extend. 1 Introduction Program visualisation is the use of graphical artifacts to represent both the static and dynamic aspects of a program [15, 19]. It takes advantage of the human visual ability to perceive pictorial representations of a program faster than the corresponding textual information. Generally, such visualisation is use..