news, links // 2010.03.15 08:23:23 [hh]

"Code Bubbles": ein sehr interessanter Java-IDE-Prototyp

Einen interessanten Ansatz für integrierte Entwicklungsumgebungen (IDEs) präsentiert Andrew Bragadon von der Brown University, Rhode Island. So genannte Bubbles (deutsch: Blasen) erlauben in der Java-IDE "Code Bubbles" die Darstellung, Bearbeitung und Weitergabe von Fragmenten wie Bug Reports, Suchergebnissen, Code Stacks, Methoden, Debug-Calls und Datenstukturen. Optisch ansprechend dargestellt wird immer nur der gewünschte Kontext, der User kann alles selbst anpassen. Ein Beispiel, das auch für andere Programmiersprachen Schule machen könnte und eine Alternative zu den starren Schemata heutiger IDEs bieten könnte.

Die englischsprachige Abstract Summary der Arbeit: "Rethinking the User Interface Paradigm of Integrated Development Environments": "Developers spend significant time reading and navigating code fragments spread across multiple locations. The file-based nature of contemporary IDEs makes it prohibitively difficult to create and maintain a simultaneous view of such fragments. We propose a novel user interface metaphor for code understanding and maintanence based on collections of lightweight, editable fragments called bubbles, which form concurrently visible working sets.




Bubbles Metaphor

There are a number of key differrences between bubbles and windows. We developed the design of bubbles to help reduce the effort needed to work with large numbers of fragments, and to support scalability. We provide a brief overview here (a much more complete description is provided in the papers):

Code Bubbles IDE

We developed a prototype IDE system based on the bubbles metaphor. The system supports a number of fragment types, including code (methods, member variables, classes), notes, visual flags, bugs, and Javadocs. The system supports multi-tasking and interruption recovery through the workspace bar, which allows users to create resizable task-oritented partitions within the 2-D workspace, which can be named and shared, or which can be persisted to the Task Shelf for recovery later. Group information is also persisted, and can be used to discover related methods.

The system also features a breakpoint debugger based on bubbles that allows the user to see multiple functions in the stack frame, and data structures sampled from those functions, side-by-side. Multiple debug sessions can be loaded side-by-side in channels for comparison, persisted for use later, or annotated and then shared."

Weitere Informationen: people/ acb/ codebubbles_site.htm