JexVis: An interactive visualization tool for exception call graphs in Java

Just as the structure of any system degrades over time as it evolves & becomes more complicated, software systems are no exception to this. A particular aspect of software systems is its exception handling mechanism which also tends to get dirty with time. Jex, a tool developed by Martin Robillard at University of British Columbia is a static analyzer that extracts exception flow information from Java programs. It generates a list of exceptions that can be raised by any method of a class & presents this information textually in the context of exception handling structure in the program. In this paper, we present JexVis, a tool that uses the textual information to generate an interactive visualization of exception structure in any program or its modules. In the process of design of JexVis, the author actually modifies the original tool, Jex so that it produces a textual output in the form of exception call graph which is then visualized using java’s swing capabilities.