Multiple textual and graphical views for interactive software development environments

Abstract

Diagram construction can be used to visually analyse and design a complex software system using natural, graphical representations describing high-level structure and semantics. Textual programming can specify detailed documentation and functionality not well expressed at a visual level. Integrating multiple textual and graphical views of software development allows programmers to utilise both representations as appropriate. Consistency management between these views must be automatically maintained by the development environment. MViews, a model for such software development environments, has been developed. MViews supports integrated textual and graphical views of software development with consistency management. MViews provides flexible program and view representation using a novel object dependency graph approach. Multiple views of a program may contain common information and are stored as graphs with textual or graphical renderings and editing. Change propagation between program components and views is supported using a novel update record mechanism. Different editing tools are integrated as views of a common program repository and new program representations and editors can be integrated without affecting existing views. A specification language for program and view state and manipulation semantics, and a visual specification language for view appearance and editing semantics, have been developed. An object-oriented architecture based on MViews abstractions allows environment specifications to be translated into a design for implementing environments. Environment designs are implemented by specialising a framework of object-oriented language classes based on the MViews architecture. A new language is described which provides object-oriented extensions to Prolog. An integrated software development environment for this language is discussed and the specification, design and implementation of this environment using MViews are described. MViews has also been reused to produce a graphical entity-relationship/textual relational database schema modeller, a dialogue painter with a graphical editing view and textual constraints view, and various program visualisation systems.