A PROCESS AND APPARATUS FOR TRACING SOFTWARE ENTITIES IN A DISTRIBUTED SYSTEM

摘要

The invention relates to a process and apparatus for tracing software entities, more particularly a tracing tool providing tracing capabilities to entities in an application. The object-tracing tool provides software components to allow tracing the execution of an application. Tracing software entities is important for software developers to permit the quick localization of errors and hence facilitate the debugging process. It is also useful for the software user who wishes to view the control flow and perhaps add some modifications to the software. Traditionally, software-tracing tools have been confined to single node systems where all the components of an application run on a single machine. The novel tracing tool presented in this application provides a method and an apparatus for tracing software entities in a distributed computing environment. This is done by using a network management entity to keep track of the location of the entities in the system and by using a library of modules that can be inherited to provide tracing capabilities. It also uses a log file to allow the program developer or user to examine the flow, the occurrence of events during a trace and the values of designated attributes. The invention also provides a computer readable storage medium containing a program element to direct a processor of a computer to implement the software tracing process.