A Rule-Based Approach for Animating Java Algorithms

Over the past years, visualization of programs has been widely applied. Algorithm animation was proven to aid in teaching and learning. It provides a convenient medium for beginners to a programming language by giving them the ability to visually discover how their programs are running. It also provides experts of a language with a means to have a visual trace utility. Lately, a new approach for adding visualization features into Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) programs was proposed. The new methodology was a dynamic one able to animate different types of algorithms. The work in this paper aims at introducing a revised extension that is able to embed visualization features into Java programs. With the new extension, Java algorithms could be animated without the need of doing any modifications to the code. In addition, the provided technique is still a general one able to animate different kinds of algorithms.