The present paper introduces the initial implementation of a software exploration tool targeting graphical user interface (GUI) driven applications. GUITracer facilitates the comprehension of GUI-driven applications by starting from their most conspicuous artefact - the user interface itself. The current implementation of the tool can be used with any Java-based target application that employs one of the AWT, Swing or SWT toolkits. The tool transparently instruments the target application and provides real time information about the GUI events fired. For each event, call relations within the application are displayed at method, class or package level, together with detailed coverage information. The tool facilitates feature location, program comprehension as well as GUI test creation by revealing the link between the application's GUI and its underlying code. As such, GUITracer is intended for software practitioners developing or maintaining GUI-driven applications. We believe our tool to be especially useful for entry-level practitioners as well as students seeking to understand complex GUI-driven software systems. The present paper details the rationale as well as the technical implementation of the tool. As a proof-of-concept implementation, we also discuss further development that can lead to our tool's integration into a software development workflow.
jMonitor is a pure Java library and runtime utility for specifying event patterns and associating them with user provided event monitors that get called when the specified runtime events occur during the execution of legacy Java applications. jMonitor APIs define an event specification abstraction layer allowing programmers to design event patterns to monitor runtime execution of legacy Java applications. jMonitor instrumentation works at the Java bytecode level and does not require the presence of source code for the Java application that is being monitored. jMonitor overloads the dynamic class loader and takes the event specification and monitors (in the form of Java class files) as additional arguments when launching the target Java application. The class bytecodes of the monitored Java program are instrumented on the fly by the jMonitor class loader according to the needs of the externally specified jMonitor event patterns and event monitors. We describe the design of jRapture: a tool for capturing and replaying Java program executions in the field. jRapture works with Java binaries (byte code) and any compliant implementation of the Java virtual machine. It employs a lightweight, transparent capture process that permits unobtrusive capture of a Java programs executions. jRapture captures interactions between a Java program and the system, including GUI, file, and console inputs, among other types, and on replay it presents each thread with exactly the same input sequence it saw during capture. In addition, jRapture has a profiling interface that permits a Java program to be instrumented for profiling o after its executions have been captured. Using an XML-based profiling specification language a tester can specify various forms of profiling to be carried out during replay.