Integrating sequence diagrams with the debugger for actionScript
Lately I was dealing with a massive refactoring effort in a large scale application. I desperately needed a way to understand the code flow before and after the refactor.
Using the debugger is quite exhausting, and besides, looking at stack trace at a certain point does not reveal the full path of nested calls the runtime went through.
The ideal visualization would be a sequence diagram describing code execution.
Looking for a solution, I discovered several tools that provide this exact functionality.
Enterprise Architect and Architexa are two of them.
But alas, none of those supports actionscript.
I corresponded with Architexa support, and turns out that they do have ActionScript support prototypes but they are not making it available until they have enough demand for it.
Does anyone know of an existing solution for actionscript?
Thanks,
-ilan
Comments
I don't understand something here. Are you taling about automatic sequence diagram generation (which sounds like sci-fi to me) or simply representing the flow of the application is sequene diagrams?
If the latter, why not use Enterprise Architect with Java prototypes? The classes are so alike, and you can always add yourself a class that doesn't appear there.
I'm taking about dynamic creation of sequence diagrams which represents the actual execution of code while debugging.
These are the description of the feature taken from the products mentioned:
Architexa - "..sequence diagrams have been integrated with the debugger so that when code is run, a diagram showing how the program executes can be generated.
Simply right clicking on a thread in the debugger's stack trace will give the option to create a diagram that the user can then explore and interact with. The diagram is automatically updated, adding new methods as they are executed"
Enterprise Architect - "...use the final stack trace history to generate Sequence diagrams within Enterprise Architect, converting the actual code execution and calls into visual diagrams"
@Yoav I am trying to make sci-fi happen. :-)
I am a little lost as to the distinction that you are making. Can you elaborate why you say 'automatic sequence diagram generation' sounds like sci-fi to you?
Yes, doing it is hard, and diagrams can get filled with useless items when doing things automatically - but I feel like there are techniques to deal with them.
The "Sci-fi" comment related to the readability of such an output. I guess you can use a debugger to track the application's flow, but I can think of so much noise in such a process that it's hard to see how this helps.
Reverse engineering class diagrams I can understand - they usually get cluttered with too much data, but it should be more readable than the actual flow of code.
Maybe by looking at real life examples I can see how noisy it really gets.
Yoav, At Architexa we have done alot of work to improve the readability of such diagrams. It is not yet perfect but we want to help you get useful results as fast as possible. Do try it out - we are looking forward to gettign the feedback.
Vineet