Graphical debugging of distributed applications: Using UML object diagrams to visualize the state of distributed applications at runtime

Abstract

While debugging is one of the most time consuming tasks software developers perform, the tool support, especially for distributed applications, is lacking according to many professional developers. The Visual Debugger is an approach to provide an easy-to-use tool which gives software developers an abstract view on the current state of their application in debugging sessions. While similar tools for non distributed applications already exist, the Visual Debugger addresses the more complex debugging scenarios in distributed applications. Therefore, several views with different levels of abstraction of the current state of an application are provided. Although the approach may be adapted to other object oriented programming languages, the current target of the Visual Debugger is languages running on the Java Virtual Machine with the focus on Java.