A Toolkit for the Visualisation of CORBA Applications

Abstract

VEDA is a visualisation environment that allows the operation of distributed applications to be visualised graphically for the purposes of testing and education. It contains a visualisation package which enables distributed processes to present their flow of control to the user in a graphical manner. With VEDA's visualisation capabilities as a platform it is the aim of this dissertation to develop a toolkit which will support the automatic visualisation of CORBA applications. The toolkit will be designed with a pedagogical function in mind and with undergraduates as the target audience. Essentially the dissertation can be broken up into two distinct tasks: The first phase of the dissertation will involve the modification an IDL compiler to enable the automatic generation of visualisation events. IDL specifies interfaces between CORBA objects. The IDL compiler generates small pieces of code known as client stubs and server skeletons which allow client processes to access remote server objects. The IDL compiler will be modified so as to produce instrumented stubs and skeletons. By instrumentation I mean the annotation of code with visualisation event calls. The event calls will convey pertinent information about the distributed object system to the visualisation engine. The visualisation engine in turn generates a graphical representation of application state and execution. The second phase of this dissertation involves extending VEDA’s visualisation capabilities to accommodate the complexities of distributed object systems. The dissertation will be evaluated under the following criteria: ease of use, generality, transparency, intuitiveness and performance.