Framework Design and Documentation

This project is sponsored by the Austrian FWF and has the following goals: Development of techniques and tools for documenting and browsing object-oriented frameworks: We are developing grphical browsers that use hypertext to describe the structure and the controlflow of frameworks. Users can abstract from details and select the abstraction level that seems appropriate to them in a specific situation. Most software design notations are developed for being printed on paper, however we plan to extend those notations for being used interactively on a computer screen. Therefore, our idea is to store a picture not as a whole but as a sequence of drawing steps that can be played forwards and backwards like a film. The user can then see how the drawing evolves. At every step, he can get explanatory comments so that he can understand what goes on. He can even explore different alternatives which lead to different pictures. We would also like to include animation so that it should be possible, say, to show how a data structure smoothly changes as a result of some algorithm.