Templated Visualization of Object State with Vebugger

Software developers often need to inspect the state of objects during debugging. Existing debuggers display a textual representation of the state of selected objects. While these textual representations often contain enough information, they are also difficult to comprehend. For example, an object that represents a color is traditionally represented by listing the numbers that comprise its RGB values. This representation, while complete, is hardly comprehensible. We describe Vebugger, an IDE plug in for Eclipse that displays object state visually. Recalling the previous example, Vebugger displays the actual color that a Color object represents in addition to its RGB values. This representation is easier to understand. Vebugger visualizes object types using a set of extensible templates. These templates are written in HTML and CSS, and they are matched to Java types by inspecting the type hierarchy. We developed a dozen such templates for a diverse set of Java types to demonstrate the capabilities of the system. Vebugger is preliminary work, we also detail future research directions and our planned evaluation strategy.