A Multiview Visualisation Architecture for Open Distributed Systems

Program visualisation is an attractive way for understanding collaboration structures of complex distributed systems. By using the concepts of the open distributed processing-reference model (ODP-RM) as entities for visualisation, a multiview visualisation architecture is presented, which provides a large degree of flexibility in visualising the actions of an ODP system. The architecture has been implemented for visualising the CORBA system resulting in a visualisation tool called OBVlouS

Program visualisation in an open distributed environment

Developing distributed systems is a complex task. Even more complex is to explain to other people how a particular distributed system works. Until recently such systems could only be demonstrated by means of scrolling text windows accompanied by pictures that explained the architecture of the system. Program visualisation can help a lot in gaining more insight in how such systems work, more than scrolling text and static pictures. In this thesis we answer the question of how to visualise applications in open distributed environments. In our approach we developed a generic method for visualising distributed applications and applied this method to CORBA systems.