A Code Structure Visualization Tool for Groovy

Real world systems often turn complex by nature. Dealing with complexity takes great amount of effort and time. A visualization tool can help to understand the code structure and ease the efforts.
This work is an attempt to build a tool to visualize the code structure. The code structure of a program is represented by an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). A language like Groovy provides easy way to tap into that structure. Furthermore, features like metaprogramming can help to easily decipher the structural information. That makes Groovy a natural choice for creating such a tool on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). The visualization tool we developed as a part of this thesis shows the hierarchical structure of the entire program as well as just selected parts of a large complex code. Using its features, programmers can visually navigate the code structure to inspect and understand how the program is organized. The tool not only displays the structure, but also can dynamically display the structure altered using compile time metaprogramming.