Patent ID: 7103876

Claim:
A system for analyzing a computer application while it is executing without terminating or interrupting the application, comprising: an application that is executing to be analyzed; an administration client; an object shell console executing on the administration client, the object shell console connected to the application so that it can extract information from the application that defines at least the basic internal structure of the application including at least one object component without interrupting the application or causing the application to terminate, wherein the at least one object component includes a set of methods of an object currently executing within the application and wherein each method of the set includes a list of variables and corresponding values available for the method and a list of arguments and corresponding values passed to or from each method; and a graphical user interface presented by the object shell console for presenting at least a portion of the extracted information that defines the internal structure to the user and allowing the user to obtain additional detailed information regarding the internal structure including values associated with the at least one object component, wherein the graphical user interface displays the set of methods, receives a selection of one of the methods, displays the list of variables available for the selected method, and displays the list of arguments being passed to or from the selected method, wherein the graphical user interface receives user input specifying an argument value for one of the displayed arguments, and wherein the object shell console passes the argument value for the displayed argument to the selected method within the application, causes the application to re-execute the method with the argument value, and extracts an updated list of variable values and argument values upon the method re-executing to display the updated list of variable values and argument values.