Reimplement IDE Tools in a Structured Way
Last updated at 10:23 pm UTC on 24 March 2007
Mentor
Andrew P. Black (Google Account: andrew.p.black)
Project Outline
The Squeak IDE consists of a collection of tools that have evolved to have inconsistent capabilities. For example, one can edit in the debugger, but not refactor from there. There's a new, powerful tool framework called the OmniBrowser, but many of the tools still need to be ported to this framework, and given the same feature set.
Technical Details
Benefits to the Student
- Learning a new powerful framework which uses a meta-graph to implement the tool behavior. OmniBrowser is a highly Object-oriented framework, for example, the name of each class as seen in the OmniBrowser is not merely a text string, but a node object that is a façade for the class itself, and can be interrogated as such.
- Discovering new tool possibilities.
- Gaining a deep understanding of reuse; by implementing tool features on the code model, rather than in the tool, they become available to all tools that can be focussed on that code.
Benefits to the Community
- Having a unified tool set which provides the same set of capabilities in every view.
- New features and extension will be easy to access from all browsers
- Having all the features uniformly available in all browsers
- Placing Squeak in a position where it is the environment of choice for experiments in tool design and innovations in user interaction.
Interested Students
