Reverse engineering Java Enterprise Applications in Eclipse
Year: 2011
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: . Java Enterprise Applications (JEAs) are complex systems composed of various technologies and programming languages other than Java, such as XML or SQL. In this heterogenous context, information is spread across various components and languages and the interactions between different application elements could be hidden. On the other hand, existing reverse engineering and quality assurance techniques are unable to analyze JEAs since they are focused on specific components or languages. In this paper we present our approach to enhance the Eclipse IDE to analyze these complex systems. We extended a meta-model for Object-Oriented systems to accommodate the heterogeneous nature of JEAs. By modeling JEAs we can support different kinds of analysis based on software visualizations and software metrics. We implemented an Eclipse plug-in to analyze JEAs called Vera to make this solution available in one of the most largely used IDE. The integration with the development environment makes the developers keep focused on a single tool instead of relying on several once. We demonstrate Vera by implementing a well known polymetric visualization, the System Complexity view, and an improved version of the Transaction Flow visualization. The latter shows what can be done by integrating information spread across different sources. We also present a browser that provides an analytical view of the code.
DOI: 10.7892/boris.10011
Authors: Krebs, Raffael, Perin, Fabrizio
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2884340905