Collapsible Tabular Visualization of Aspects in Object Oriented Programming

Abstract

Due to its implicit invocation nature ofAspect Oriented Programming (AOP), locating a jointpoint for executing aspect is extremely difficult. Hence,it becomes difficult to understand the application’sflow and behavior. Current AOP visualization tools havelimitations such as high dependency on other tools,confusing and excessive use of color to represent aspectsand using an outdated version of AspectJ. In thispaper, we propose a new approach collapsibletabular visualization tool to visualize and represent AOPfeatures to aid the programmers in betterunderstanding AOP applications. We have come outof traditional color-based aspect visualization and developeda web based tool: AspectViz that visualizes the aspects ina simple collapsible table. A questionnaire containingfour different questions related to aspects visualizationwas developed to compare AspectViz with currentvisualization tools. 20 graduate students andprofessional software developers were invited to participatein the test experiment as well as the survey. We havecompared its performance with existing AOPvisualization tools i.e. the AJDT and the AspectMaps andshowed how it outperformed in many cases, which is nocolor confusion, simple tabular visualization of aspects, nodependency on third-party software, easy to understand andthe time it took to find a particular aspect was less etc.Collapsible tabular visualization enhanced the usability andperformance of aspect locating in aspect-orientedprogramming

    Similar works