Visualisation-based tool support for the development of aspect-oriented programs
Jérôme Pfeiffer, John R. Gurd · 2006
The development of aspect-oriented software requires tool support to make the aspect-oriented structures explicit and to assist programmers in understanding the overall source code, including aspects. Tools exist to meet this need, but they struggle with large aspect-oriented programs; as a result, navigating the source code becomes difficult.This paper describes the application of Treemaps, a well-known format for visualisation of hierarchical data, to the visualisation of aspect-oriented programs. We present and discuss a new scheme for browsing and visualising such programs, which is capable of coping with programs of large size. Additionally, we describe a prototype tool that implements the presented scheme, and report on the results of a user study which demonstrates the benefits of using the tool.