International Business Machines Corporation

Douglas N Kimelman

Wim De Pauw

John M Vlissides

Vincent J Cina, Jr

Andrew R Helm

A dynamic visual presentation animates how classes or objects send messages and relate to each other in an object-oriented program during the program's execution. The presentation depicts classes or objects as graphical nodes on a computer display. The relative proximity of these nodes varies to reflect a specific relationship between classes or objects: either communication, creation frequency, or aggregation. Communication between objects is also dynamically depicted as a set of one or more line segments each passing through two or more of the nodes that have classes of methods on a call stack. Mapping these conceptual relationships into dynamic, spatial relationships makes them explicit and observable, allowing a user to better understand, debug, and tune the object-oriented program.

Animated display showing execution of object-oriented programs

A computer program displayed as text on a graphical display has each line of code divided into segments that can be highlighted. The code is being executed by a number of processors in parallel. A highlight, preferably a background color, which causes a code line segment to look like a large cursor, is associated with each processor. When a processor is executing a line of the program code, the highlight associated with that processor is used to highlight or light up the segment associated with that processor on the line of code being executed by the processor. In a preferred embodiment, the segments for a given processor are of equal lengths and aligned in vertical tracks. This gives the visual effect of the colored background moving along the track as the processor executes the lines of code. Since there are many processors executing the code, there are many tracks on the screen. There can be more than one processor (colored cursor) associated with a single track.

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Danbury, CT, United States of America

Douglas N Kimelman