Advancing the State of the Art in Run-Time Inspection

摘要

Modern software development is inconceivable without tools to inspect running programs. Run-time inspection is a crucial factor for both building complex systems and for maintaining legacy systems. Run-time inspection includes not only querying of program state but also controlling its execution. Applications of run-time inspection range from code-level tasks like debugging, profiling, tracing, testing, and monitoring to conceptual activities such as program comprehension, software visualization and reverse engineering. New applications incorporate runtime inspection as a programming concept in the style of event-condition-action rules. The diversity of programming paradigms such as configurable software, components, aspect-orientation, generative programming, real-time programming, distributed programming, ubiquitous computing, applets and web services emphasizes the need to deal with heterogeneous run-time information and different levels of abstraction. Lacking well-established technologies and models for representing and accessing program dynamics, tools must use ad-hoc mechanisms. This limits reuse and interoperability. De facto standards for run-time inspection such as the Java Platform Debugger Architecture (JPDA) have improved the situation but do not cope with all requirements. Implementers seeking to create debugging environments for ubiquitous computing are faced with even greater difficulties.