The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Apr. 17, 2001
Filed:
Aug. 01, 1996
Wim De Pauw, Scarborough, NY (US);
John Matthew Vlissides, Mohegan Lake, NY (US);
David Hod Lorenz, Haifa, IL;
Mark N. Wegman, Ossining, NY (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
An improved method and system for visualizing an object-oriented program's execution in a manner that facilitates understanding, debugging, and tuning programs of arbitrary size and complexity by visually depicting a sequence of one or more messages to an object or between objects as a tree. Each node in the tree represents an object, and each edge represents a message between the objects. To manage the complexity of what is displayed, the user may elect to collapse subtrees so that they appear in abbreviated form. The user may expand collapsed subtrees so that they are visible in full. By selectively expanding and collapsing subtrees, the user can examine only those parts of the execution that are immediately relevant. The user may specify additional criteria for classifying subtrees, i.e., the conditions under which two subtrees are deemed equivalent. The system can then consolidate equivalent subtrees automatically, replacing them with a more general execution pattern that subsumes them all. Furthermore, an execution pattern can be augmented with summary (e.g., performance or complexity) information. This summary information reflects characteristics of the message sequences, for example, the resource usage they incur, or a measure of their complexity. Preferably, the summary information is superimposed graphically on the execution pattern's graphical rendition.