CLPGUI: a generic graphical user interface for constraint logic programming over finite domains

TL;DR

CLPGUI is a versatile graphical interface for constraint logic programming over finite domains, enabling visualization, interaction, and debugging of complex programs with innovative 2D and 3D visualizations of search trees.

Contribution

It introduces a client-server GUI architecture for CLP over finite domains, with dynamic visualizations and interactive features for teaching and debugging.

Findings

Supports incremental posting of constraints and goals

Provides dynamic 2D and 3D visualizations of search trees

Demonstrates effectiveness in GNU-Prolog environment

Abstract

CLPGUI is a graphical user interface for visualizing and interacting with constraint logic programs over finite domains. In CLPGUI, the user can control the execution of a CLP program through several views of constraints, of finite domain variables and of the search tree. CLPGUI is intended to be used both for teaching purposes, and for debugging and improving complex programs of realworld scale. It is based on a client-server architecture for connecting the CLP process to a Java-based GUI process. Communication by message passing provides an open architecture which facilitates the reuse of graphical components and the porting to different constraint programming systems. Arbitrary constraints and goals can be posted incrementally from the GUI. We propose several dynamic 2D and 3D visualizations of the search tree and of the evolution of finite domain variables. We argue that the 3D representation of search trees proposed in this paper provides the most appropriate visualization of large search trees. We describe the current implementation of the annotations and of the interactive execution model in GNU-Prolog, and report some evaluation results.