4D Ariadne the Static Debugger of Java Programs

Abstract

Development environments support the programmer in numerous ways from syntax highlighting to different refactoring and code generating methods. However, there are cases where these tools are limited or not usable, such as getting familiar with large and complex source codes written by a third person; finding the complexities of huge projects or finding semantic errors.

In this paper we present our static analyzer tool, called 4D Ariadne, which concentrates on these problems. 4D Ariadne is a static debugger of Object Oriented applications written in Java programming language. It calculates data dependencies of objects being able to compute them both forward and backward. As 4D Ariadne provides only the direct influences to the user, it can be considered as an alternative of traditional debuggers, without executing the code. 4D Ariadne also provides dynamic call graphs representing polymorphic properties of objects.