Visualizing interactions in distributed Java applications

Distributed Java applications represent a large growth area in software. Such applications are composed of distributed components that interact with each other to provide the desired functionality. Visualization of these interactions helps designers, programmers and testers in many aspects of software development: understanding application behavior, testing, debugging, checking conformance of the implementation with the design, and performance tuning. We have developed a technique to visualize execution of distributed Java RMI-based applications in terms of sequences of method calls between distributed objects. In this paper we describe the technique and a prototype implementation of a Tool for Remote Interactions Monitoring (TRIM).