Using GELO to visualize software systems

Abstract

GELO is a package that supports the interactive graphical display of software systems. Its features include built-in panning and zooming, abstraction of objects too small to see, pick correlation, windowing, and scroll bars. GELO creates a hierarchy of graphical objects that correspond to the components of the structure being displayed. Five flavors of graphical objects are supported, including those for simple structures, tiled layouts, and graph-based layouts. This framework is powerful enough to handle a wide variety of graphical visualizations, and it is general enough that new object flavors can be smoothly integrated in the future. GELO is easy to learn and to use, and is presently employed in two software development environments. Among its current applications are a variety of visual languages, an interactive display of call graphs, an interactive display of data structures, and a graphical representation of module dependencies.