Declarative and visual debugging in Eclipse

We present a declarative and visual debugging environment for Eclipse called JIVE.1 Traditional debugging is procedural in that a programmer must proceed step-by-step and object-by-object in order to uncover the cause of an error. In contrast, we present a declarative approach to debugging consisting of a flexible set of queries over a program's execution history as well as over individual runtime states. This runtime information is depicted in a visual manner during program execution in order to aid the debugging process. The current state of execution is depicted through an enhanced object diagram, and the history of execution is depicted by a sequence diagram. Our methodology makes use of these diagrams as a means of formulating queries and reporting results in a visual manner. It also supports revisiting past runtime states, either through reverse stepping of the program or through queries that report information from past states. Eclipse serves as an ideal framework for implementing JIVE since, like the JIVE architecture, it makes crucial use of the Java Platform Debugging Architecture (JPDA). This paper presents details of the JIVE architecture and its integration into Eclipse.