D12: Magellan: Program Comprehension and Analysis in EclipseTM

Michael Eichberg, Technische Universität Darmstadt
Thorsten Schäfer, Technische Universität Darmstadt

Wednesday, March 16, 12:00
Thursday, March 17, 16:00

Magellan is a query-based, extensible platform for software comprehension integrated with Eclipse. All artefacts of a project, e.g., Java code, deployment descriptors, properties files, etc., are transformed into a uniform XML-based representation and stored into a database; XQuery is used to explore the database connecting interrelated pieces of information, which are spread around different artefacts.

Using Magellan with an EJB project e.g., enables to retrieve methods declared with container-based transaction management, which create user transactions in their code: hence, violating the EJB specification. The information needed to retrieve such methods, crosscuts the artefact structure of an EJB project. Magellan lifts such crosscutting structures into modular units: the results of executing a query get integrated into one view and visualized using a graph, which can further be navigated through. This allows exploring a software project as a net of interconnected information entities, bridging the gap that exists when using trees and multiple independent views for browsing through a software project.

You will see a live demonstration of how to use pre-defined Magellan queries to unveil and explore crosscutting views of a project. Furthermore, we will demonstrate how to extend Magallan's capabilities by defining new project- specific queries. Magellan can be downloaded from: http://www.st.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/pages/projects/Magellan