A High-level View of Java Applications

Static analysis of object-oriented applications has become widespread over the last decade, mainly in the context of compile-time optimizations. The paper describes how static analysis of virtual method calls can be employed to provide a high-level view of Java applications. The result is a method call graph that can be built from either source or bytecode, and a graphical browser that enables the user to analyze control flow and the coupling between classes and packages in an intuitive fashion, thereby supporting application design as well as refactoring and debugging. In order to achieve the necessary bijection between source and bytecode representations of classes, we implement a new approach based on source code pre-processing.