Jaroslav Snajberk

Lowering Visual Clutter in Large Component Diagrams

Nowadays component applications can easily consist of hundreds or thousands of components and it is thus difficult to understand their structure. Diagram visualisation does not help much because of visual clutter caused by big amount of elements and connections, especially in the case of flat component models. This paper describes a novel approach of removing a large part of connections from the diagram while preserving the information about component interconnections. It uses a separated components area to show the components with big amount of connections. For each component in this area, clustered interfaces are shown instead of all interfaces, with the ability to show details on demand. The main idea of this technique can be used in a similar way to reduce the clutter in node-link graphs. To show the effect of this technique we discuss example lines reductions for several component applications.

Design of a Component-Based Simulation Framework for Component Testing Using SpringDM

In this paper, we present the design of a simulation framework aimed to support testing of real components in a simulation environment. This enables thorough tests of software components without the need to create their models.

A Visualization Tool for Reverse-Engineering of Complex Component Applications

Nowadays, component applications can contain thousands of components whose structure is difficult to understand. As a solution, we proposed a visualization technique that removes large part of connections from component binding diagrams. This technique uses a separated components area to display components with a big amount of connections detached from the main diagram. In this area, component interfaces are shown clustered instead of showing them all. Benefit of this approach is improvement of application understanding by reducing the diagrams visual clutter during its reverse engineering. In this work, we present implementation of the technique in a form of a tool, called CoCA-Ex. CoCA-Ex is a publicly accessible web application and a reverse-engineering solution for various component systems. The tool is built on modern technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript and has Java EE server backend.

Visualization of Component-Based Applications Structure Using AIVA

The architecture of component-based applications can easily contain hundreds of components with a complex structure. Such structure is created from various types of relations between these components. However, component architects and assemblers need to study more than just simple structure in order to be able to analyze these applications. Many details might be necessary to check to ensure compatibility and re-usability of existing components. Thus, comprehensible visualization of structure is important for the maintenance and evolution of these complex systems. AIVA is the implementation of an approach that is able to visualize these structures comprehensibly while making details easy to reach. It combines various interactive techniques to achieve this goal. This paper describes the possibilities of AIVA as they are implemented, while briefly discussing the theory behind such functionality.

ENT: A Generic Meta-Model for the Description of Component-Based Applications

Current best practice in modeling component-based applications is the use of UML extended by a profile. This solution provides a general and common approach of application description and allows to capture some details based on the concrete component model. It has however disadvantages due to the limitations of UML itself, like little scalability or lack of inherent model semantics. In this paper we propose a solution to overcome these limitations, in the form of a meta-model developed directly for the description of components and component-based applications. Its unique aspect is the use of faceted classification to introduce additional semantics and structuring to the derived models. We describe the features and advantages of this meta-model and illustrate its aspects on a model example of a simple OSGi application. At the end of paper we also propose the usage of this meta-model in visualization of component-based applications.

Visual clutter reduction for UML component diagrams: A tool presentation

Nowadays component applications can easily consist of hundreds or thousands of components and it is thus difficult to understand their structure. Earlier, we proposed a novel approach of removing large part of connections from the diagram while preserving the information about component interconnections. It uses a separated components area to remove the components with a big amount of connections from the main diagram. For each component in this area, clustered interfaces are shown instead of all interfaces, with the ability to show details on demand. In this work we present the implementation of this technique as a web application and a reverse-engineering solution for component applications.

AIVA vs UML: Comparison of Component Application Visualizations in a Case-study

UML is the state of the art in visualization of software. However, it does not satisfy the needs of modeling in the domain of component applications and complex software architectures. UML has to be extended with profiles so as to be able to model the specifics of a particular component model; its diagrams are not scalable, therefore one has to balance the amount of information and readability; and it presents all the information at once so visual data mining is harder. These were the reasons for developing a completely new approach called AIVA (Advanced Interactive Visualization Approach) that focuses solely on the component domain and addresses the problems of scalability and readability by adopting interactive techniques like information hiding and details on demand. In this paper we analyse how this new approach stands compared with UML by modelling a nontrivial component application.

An Advanced Interactive Visualization Approach with extra functional properties

This work presents an Advanced Interactive Visualization Approach (AIVA) that is able to visualize the structure of many component-based applications. Moreover, AIVA is able to visualize extra-functional properties (EFP) in combination with the traditional visualization of the component structure. To our best knowledge, existing tools cover both areas separately. Hence, the approach of this work fills this gap, in a form of an advanced tool. AIVA is currently being scientifically evaluated, however, the use of extra-functional properties is still in the initial phase. In this paper, we demonstrate our early approach to display a variety of EFPs in a visually convenient manner, integrated in AIVA.