A Hybrid Query Engine for the Structural Analysis of Java and AspectJ Programs
Hamoun Ghanbari, Constantinos A. Constantinides, Venera Arnaoudova · 2008
Graphical representation has long been used in the domain of software engineering to provide comprehension aids. Generic and query-based code browsers have contributed towards program comprehension through the provision of high-level customized structural views of the source code. Some research has already focused on combining the advantages of the two techniques through the representation of high-level query-based views using different data visualization techniques. However, little has been done towards the visualization of the query composition process itself. In this paper we develop a query engine for software structural analysis which provides a visual query interface over a high-level textual query language to eliminate the requirement for understanding the query language syntax. Our implementation is provided as an Eclipse plug-in, namely HyQ4J (which stands for hybrid query for Java).