Meta-driven browsers

  • Authors:
  • Alexandre Bergel;Stéphane Ducasse;Colin Putney;Roel Wuyts

  • Affiliations:
  • DSG, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland;LISTIC University of Savoie, France and University of Bern, Switzerland;Wiresong, Canada;Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • ISC'06 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Advances in smalltalk
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Smalltalk is not only an object-oriented programming language; it is also known for its extensive integrated development environment supporting interactive and dynamic programming. While the default tools are adequate for browsing the code and developing applications, it is often cumbersome to extend the environment to support new language constructs or to build additional tools supporting new ways of navigating and presenting source code. In this paper, we present the OmniBrowser, a browser framework that supports the definition of browsers based on an explicit metamodel. With OmniBrowser a domain model is described in a graph and the navigation in this graph is specified in its associated metagraph. We present how new browsers are built from predefined parts and how new tools are easily described. The browser framework is implemented in the Squeak Smalltalk environment. This paper shows several concrete instantiations of the framework: a remake of the ubiquitous Smalltalk System Browser, and a coverage browser.