jGRASP, An Open Source IDE

Many technical writers who have worked in a software development environment have some programming experience and will likely have used an integrated development environment (IDE) like Eclipse. For many, who might want to learn a programming language, Eclipse is overkill.

jGRASP is an open source IDE, developed at Auburn University, that has features that should help beginning programmers.

jGRASP is a lightweight development environment, created specifically to provide automatic generation of software visualizations to improve the comprehensibility of software. jGRASP is implemented in Java, and runs on all platforms with a Java Virtual Machine (Java version 1.5 or higher). jGRASP produces Control Structure Diagrams (CSDs) for Java, C, C++, Objective-C, Python, Ada, and VHDL; Complexity Profile Graphs (CPGs) for Java and Ada; UML class diagrams for Java; and has dynamic object viewers and a viewer canvas that work in conjunction with an integrated debugger and workbench for Java. The viewers include a data structure identifier mechanism which recognizes objects that represent traditional data structures such as stacks, queues, linked lists, binary trees, and hash tables, and then displays them in an intuitive textbook-like presentation view.

The viewers look like they would be especially useful in debugging code.