The Eclipse Runtime Perspective for Object-Oriented Code Exploration and Program Comprehension

We propose a novel Eclipse Perspective, the Runtime Perspective, that makes a global hierarchy of abstract objects a first-class view of an object-oriented system at design-time. The perspective includes many views that complement the existing views in the Java Development perspective: an Abstract Object Tree with a search feature to complement the Package Explorer, an Abstract Stack to complement the Call Hierarchy, and a Partial Object Graph, to complement the class diagrams extracted by many existing plugins.