Research Report: Cacti: A Front End for Program Visualization
Steven P. Reiss · 1997
In this paper we describe a system that allows the user to rapidly construct program visualizations over a variety of data sources. Such a system is a necessary foundation for using visualization as an aid to software understanding. The system supports an arbitrary set of data sources so that information from both static and dynamic analysis can be combined to offer meaningful software visualizations. It provides the user with a visual universal-relation front end that supports the dejinition of queries over multiple data sources without knowledge of the structure or contents of the sources. It uses a Jlexible back end with a range of different visualizations, most geared to the e@cient display of large amounts of data. The result is a highquality, easy-to-de$ne program visualization that can address specijic problems and hence is useful for software understanding. The overall system is flexible and extensible in that both the underlying data model and the set of visualizations are dejined in resource jiles. 1.0 Background and Motivation