The Visual Code
Navigator is intended to be an open toolset for
software visualization. The tools should implement various
visual techniques for getting interactive insight into large
software repositories. The toolset should be extendable with
new techniques, deployed as separate tools.
Currently, the toolset
contains four standalone applications:
CVSscan: Visualization of Code Evolution
(file level)
CVSscan is a tool
aimed at developers involved in maintenance projects.
The assumption is that
in large software projects, maintenance is often performed
by a different team than the one who did the initial
development. Therefore, the unwritten knowledge that
existed in the context of the initial development team is
lost. CVSscan helps developers to recover part of this
information. It enables them to build correlations
between the structure of a source code file and its
evolution in time. The information about code evolution
extracted from CVS repositories, and is visualized using a
line based display similar to the SeeSoft. A more detailed
description of the tool and the techniques it implements is
available
here.
CVSgrab: Visualization of Code Evolution
(project level)
CVSgrab is a tool aimed at developers
involved in maintenance projects. It acquires the
information about artifact evolution of entire projects and
it visualizes it down to file level. It enables correlations
based on activity and contributors. It may be used as a CVS
data acquisition tool for the CVSscan application.
The CSV tool targets
the code writing and debugging phases. It visualizes code
syntactic constructs, such as classes, functions,
statements, and identifiers, and offers therefore
full-fledged lexical highlighting. The tool offers
also a comprehensive query mechanism to enable easy
exploration and navigation of code. More information about
the techniques implemented in this tool is available
here.
DreamCode is a tool
for visualizing the C++ AST of a program using cushioned
treemaps. It uses the GCC-XML, an XML output extension to
the C++ front-end of the GCC compiler, to acquire the AST of
a program. Then it visualizes the nesting of symbols in a
compiled (object code) project, e.g. function signatures,
classes, and data objects in namespaces, giving an interface
perspective over a program. More information about the
techniques implemented in this tool is available
here.
Requirements:
A Graphics card that supports the
ARB_FRAGMENT_PROGRAM extension of OpenGl (e.g.
NVidia Geforce FX or later, ATI Radeon series 9000
or later, XGI Volari, Intel 915G)
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