How to Use JIVE: New Features — Aditya Kapre

Aditya Kapre
3 min readOct 1, 2021

The unique features of JIVE benefit programmers through method interaction and excellent object structure interaction. It is one of Eclipse’s execution environments with the most interactive interphase, and it allows programmers to step backward and forward during execution.

It is easy to find error-laden code sections in JIVE through the search engine superimposed on the runtime structures. Therefore, this query-based debugging makes it unnecessary for the developer not to go through all lines of code to find errors.

Besides developers, JIVE is uniquely designed to make things easy for the software maintainers. This is because it allows them to visualize the intervals of code that are to be modified. The following is how you use some of the unique features of JIVE.

The State Diagram Plugin

This extension enables you to check the properties of the model of the program being executed under JIVE. You do this by extracting a finite-state model within the program’s execution trace. There are two primary ways to view the program’s properties through this extraction: the state diagram view and the property checker view.

To find properties in the state diagram view, you should input an extraction trace and select the fields in the program constituting a state vector. The diagram will show you how the state of the fields in question has changed at different levels of development. All you need to do is specify the criteria for model abstraction using a provided textbox.

The displayed state diagram shows the progression of state changes for these fields. One can view the state diagram in a reduced form by specifying model abstraction criteria through a simple textbox. You can view the properties of the program through a textbox.

Interactive Visualizations

JIVE enables you to view your program’s call history and its runtime state graphically. The platform allows you to filter and scale the diagrams so that you only see what is relevant to what you are doing at the moment.

You get to see the program’s call history in the form of a sequence diagram where the execution codes are color-coded to make them easier to trace.

Debugging

Debugging is one of the most grueling and mundane parts of a programmer’s job. JIVE eliminates the need to go line by line to debug your program by adopting a declarative debugging method. It provides queries concerning the entire coding history of the program. It formulates these queries through diagrams or and the source code and then presents them in tabular format. With fewer lines of code, you are better able to find the defective ones and debug them.

Reverse Stepping for Debugging

JIVE has buttons on which you can click to move back to specific points in program execution. This feature enables you to debug the program if you realize the error after the section with bugs has already been executed. Forward stepping is also available, but by its nature, it doesn’t provide as much relief as reverse stepping.

Reverse stepping works hand in hand with query-based debugging as it helps you move back and forth across defective sections of code while rectifying them.

Originally published at https://www.adityakapre.com on October 1, 2021.

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Aditya Kapre

Based in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, Aditya Kapre is a software engineer. Learn more about internships to software development.