The ISI visual design editor generator

摘要

The benefits of "domain specific" languages and development environments are widely recognized. Constructing an environment for a new domain, however, remains a costly activity, requiring expertise in several areas of software development as wellas in the targeted domain. The ISI design editor generator and design environment comprises a novel infrastructure that simplifies this task, producing visual domain-specific design environments. This paper presents the runtime architecture of theseenvironments, a visual "specify-by-example" capability that deals with a major portion of editor generation, and an implementation that uses a COTS product (Microsoft PowerPoint) as both graphic middleware and end-user GUI.