O Uso de Técnicas Visuais e Navegacionais para a Compreensão de Frameworks Orientados a Objetos
Abstract
Object-oriented frameworks represent a powerful reuse technology to build, by specialization applications in a given domain. However, to understand the classes that compose a framework for their specialization is a hard and time consuming task. For this reason, tools that allow to analyze applications built using a framework, through the visualization of the static and dynamic structure of framework classes, are valuable. This work describes a tool that combines visual and navigational techniques to help the understanding of the dynamic behavior of a framework, through the dynamic analysis of applications built with it. This dynamic analysis is made using techniques of computational reflection, that allow the transparent monitoring of the application behavior. The visual representation allows to quickly identify representation of the framework, manually or automatically animate the sequence of messages and access the code of the methods. The tool has shown to be very useful to reduce much of the time needed to understand the behavior of both frameworks and existing class libraries.
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