xDIVA: A debugging visualization system with composable visualization metaphors

Despite the progress that has been made in the field of program visualization, programmers nowadays still rely on inserting extra code (e.g., print statements) to visualize complicated program states during debugging. Only recently have tools such as DDD (Data Display Debugger) (5) begun to provide visualization of data types for programmers. Still such visualization remains limited. There are many obstacles that have impeded and continue to impede program visualization for practical use. One such major obstacle one is the wide variety of data types in a computer program. Given the variety and complexity of computations for many domains, it is unlikely that visualizations will be available a priori to cover everything that might be interesting. As an attempt to address the problem, a debugging visualization tool called xDIVA is presented. The visual effects of xDIVA use 3-D shapes, colors, and animations from a 3-D rendering engine. xDIVA conducts a novel and meticulous object-oriented design so that visualization metaphors are interactive, composable, and decoupled from data, i.e. a complicated visualization metaphor can be composed and assembled from basic ones, each of which is independently replaceable. The benefits of xDIVA are demonstrated by several applications.