Visual Programming in an Object-Oriented Framework
Philipp Ackermann, Dominik Eichelberg, Bernhard Wagner · 2002
Instead of scripting, a visual programming approach was explored for a component runtime environment. It provides generic access to framework objects and supports black-box reuse through interactive assembly. This paper describes the execution model of this intuitive composition approach and outlines useful applications that deal with changing requirements, short prototyping cycles, and user-friendly system reconfigurations. Introduction Visual programming languages [Burn95] which represent data and their flow with pictures rather than text (source code) are not widely used because the specification of algorithms based on a visual data flow is very limited. The visual representation of procedural abstractions is not appropriate for large systems. This disadvantage is reduced in object-oriented systems because objects encapsulate state (data) and behavior (methods/algorithms) so that visual programs are no longer used for algorithmic specification, but may be applied for object compos...