Supporting tailorable program visualisation through literate programming and fisheye views

This paper describes the “Jaba” programming environment which allows users to tailor the level of abstraction at which they visualise, browse, edit and document object-oriented programs. Its design draws on concepts from literate programming, holophrasting displays, fisheye visualisation and hypertext to allow programmers to rapidly move between abstract and detailed views of Java classes. The integration of these four techniques provides a synergy at the interface that, we argue, is unavailable in current commercial systems.