A Hybrid Query Engine for the Structural Analysis of Java and AspectJ Programs

Graphical representation has long been used in the domain of software engineering to provide comprehension aids. Generic and query-based code browsers have contributed towards program comprehension through the provision of high-level customized structural views of the source code. Some research has already focused on combining the advantages of the two techniques through the representation of high-level query-based views using different data visualization techniques. However, little has been done towards the visualization of the query composition process itself. In this paper we develop a query engine for software structural analysis which provides a visual query interface over a high-level textual query language to eliminate the requirement for understanding the query language syntax. Our implementation is provided as an Eclipse plug-in, namely HyQ4J (which stands for hybrid query for Java).