A visual object-oriented development environment (VOODE)

ABSTRACT

Numerous classes, complex inheritance and containment hierarchies, and diverse patterns, all contribute to difficulties in understanding, reusing, debugging and tuning large object-oriented systems. To help overcome these difficulties, we introduce a visual programming methodology and a visual development environment with novel views for development of object-oriented class models. We introduce container and contained object views, direct manipulations as a visual programming tool and show how syntax correctness is achieved by visual programming. Case studies involving browsing and creation of real object-oriented application are presented to demonstrate the benefits of visual programming.The ability to edit and browse existing applications or frameworks with a visual tool, is most important to a new developer who enters an existing project. The learning curve can be reduced and familiarity with a new application can be achieved in a shorter period of time. Moreover, the quantity of information needed to be learned is reduced since visual tools allow the developer to focus immediately only on the relevant parts of the application.

REFERENCES

• 1: {1} Philip T. Cox, "Picture the future," Object Magazine, pp. 46-49, August 1993.
• 2: Ephraim P. Glinert, Visual Programming Environments: Applications and Issues, IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, 1990
• 3: T. Ichikawa , M. Hirakawa, Visual programming—toward realization of user-friendly programming environments, Proceedings of the 1987 Fall Joint Computer Conference on Exploring technology: today and tomorrow, p.129-137, December 1987, Dallas, Texas, United States
• 4: {4} Theo Mandel, The GUI-OOUI War, Van Nostrand Reinhold Company Inc., 1994.
• 5: {5} IBM published, Object-Oriented Interface Design - The Common User Access, IBM, 1992.
• 6: {6} IBM published, IBM Smalltalk & VisualAge Team Development Guide, IBM, 1994.
• 7: {7} IBM published, SOM Objects Developers Tookit Users Guide, IBM, 1994.
• 8: {8} Ben Shneiderman, "Direct Manipulations A Step Beyond Programming Languages," Computer, pp. 57-69, August 1983.
• 9: Richard Chimera , Ben Shneiderman, An exploratory evaluation of three interfaces for browsing large hierarchical tables of contents, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), v.12 n.4, p.383-406, Oct. 1994 [doi>10.1145/185462.185483]
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.6 Programming Environments
          Subjects: Graphical environments

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques
          Subjects: Object-oriented design methods

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Measurement, Theory