Design and implementation of Envision - a visual programming system
Dimitar Asenov · Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich) · 2011
In the following work we will present the concept and initial implementation of Envision.Envision combines the features of an integrated development environment with the functionality of an information system to offer a unified tool for software engineers.The system is independent of a specific programming language and offers a visual programming approach for developing applications.Envision is designed for general purpose development and targets professional programmers that work on software projects of all scales.We first describe the basic requirements for the Envision platform.They define a flexible framework which can be extended and customized to provide a wide variety of functionality used in everyday software engineering.The core of this work consists of designing a modular architecture for Envision and implementing a first version of the system.The focus of the current implementation is on mechanisms for visual object oriented programming.We describe the modules that constitute Envision and outline how they achieve the requirements and goals set earlier.The current state of the platform and the progress regarding visual programming is illustrated using examples from the running tool.Finally we outline our plans for further development of Envision in the areas of visual interaction, semantic version control, statistics, software verification and others.