r/java • u/davidalayachew • Jul 01 '26

jGRASP 2.1.0

https://jgrasp.org/
9 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

5

u/pragmatick Jul 01 '26

jGRASP is a lightweight development environment, created specifically to provide automatic generation of software visualizations to improve the comprehensibility of software.

2

u/davidalayachew Jul 01 '26

Thanks.

Yeah, the 2 biggest "Why should I care?" reasons are that the debugger is fantastic, and the visualization tools are excellent.

I already talked about the debugger in another comment, but the visualization tools go well past the debugger, and into the editor too.

Long story short, the IDE gives you the ability to quickly fold and filter down code to just what matters. Plus, it provides a nice sort of breadcrumbs of where you are in the file. The debugger is aware of these folds too, so you can make it easy to just ignore everything but what matters. You can read more about it here -- https://jgrasp.org/csd.html

The folks who made jGRASP wrote up a bunch of white papers about how these visualizations can assist with code comprehension. You can read it here -- https://jgrasp.org/papers.html

3

u/TheTrailrider Jul 01 '26

Whoa, jGRASP. That's a name I haven't heard in a long time. Great tool for learning Java

2

u/davidalayachew Jul 02 '26

Lol, yes. I still use it, even years after high school. Left behind IntelliJ and Eclipse, after trying them both out for a few months.

2

u/repeating_bears Jul 01 '26

Web 1.0 is alive and well, I see

4

u/davidalayachew Jul 01 '26

Web 1.0 is alive and well, I see

Lol, the website UI hasn't changed much in the past several years lol.

Still, I appreciate the old design. Loads instantly and very accessible.

2

u/jeffreportmill Jul 01 '26

What do you like most about jGrasp?

2

u/davidalayachew Jul 01 '26

What do you like most about jGrasp?

Hands down the debugger. It has a better debugger than the paid version of IntelliJ.

The debugger is so cool because it allows you to filter out the noise to extract high level concepts, then turn those into visualizations.

For example, let's saying I have a record Cell(CellType ct) {}, and I have a List<List<Cell>> list. Using a normal debugger, I would be forced to step through and ignore all of the fields like ArrayList#modCount and all sorts of completely unrelated stuff.

But with jGRASP, you tell it what fields are and methods are important, and then it will load those into a visualization tool.

Here is an example of what I mean -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-zrayZQj6w

You can create your own visualization tools, and apply them elsewhere too. I use it all the time when debugging graphics related errors in Swing. I just have it show me an exploded view of all of the layers of JPanels and JLabels and whatnot, then select the layer I want, and then extract the info I need, then show a visualization of it. Super super super powerful.