InsECTJ: a generic instrumentation framework for collecting dynamic information within Eclipse

  • Authors:
  • Arjan Seesing;Alessandro Orso

  • Affiliations:
  • Georgia Institute of Technology;Georgia Institute of Technology

  • Venue:
  • eclipse '05 Proceedings of the 2005 OOPSLA workshop on Eclipse technology eXchange
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

The heterogeneity and dynamism of today's software systems make it difficult to assess the performance, correctness, or security of a system outside the actual time and context in which it executes. As a result, there is an increasing interest in techniques for monitoring and dynamically analyzing the runtime behavior of an application. These techniques are usually implemented using ad-hoc solutions that result in tools that are hard to develop, maintain, and reuse. To address this problem, we present a generic framework that enables the collection of different kinds of runtime information, such as data about the execution of various code entities and constructs. The framework lets users easily define how to process the collected information and is extensible to collect new types of information. We implemented the framework for the Java language as a set of Eclipse plugins. The plug-ins provide an intuitive GUI through which the functionality of the framework can be exploited. We also present an example of use of our framework and plugins that helps illustrate their functionality and shows their ease of use.