Implementation of JIT (Just in Time) Visuali-zation of Changes in Source Code

Abstract

The need for software developers increases at a high pace. But the programming is a difficult cognitive skill to learn and the supply of good programmers does not meet the need. Es-pecially hard it is for beginner programmers and therefore there are high drop-out rates in universities. Tools that help beginner programmers to understand the code exist. But none provides real-time visualization of source code evolution. The goal of this thesis is to deve-lop a tool that visualizes source code changes in real-time. The thesis describes the deve-lopment process and architecture of the source code analysis tool and gives usage scenarios on how the tool could help new developers understand object-oriented code. The main ob-jective is to analyze Java code. The real-time analysis is achieved by using a language server protocol that provides real-time data from the user’s editor. To analyze the code, GraphifyEvolution is used. Even though the main analyzed language is Java, the tool’s architecture supports the addition of a new language. The developed tool is called JitEvo-lution.