2004, ‘TiViPE –Tino’s Visual Programming Environment

TiViPE [4] is a component based visual programming environment (VPE) that enables users to build programs by construction of a network of components interactively. A single module (component), represented by a graphi-cal icon, is a computational unit. Multiple icons can be connected to each other to yield a directed graph (a net-work) that represent a program. TiViPE is, in appear-ance similar to programs such as AVS [9], Vee [3, 1], OpenDX [6], Khoros [12], LabVIEW [7], NeatVision [10], and ViPEr [8], but presents some fundamental differences. TiViPE integrates documentation with an existing routine call (that has been programmed in C++, C, Fortran, or Java), and automatically generates C++ code that is com-piled to stand-alone program. This program is able to exe-cute the specified routine, provide a graphical icon, or give html-formatted documentation about the routine. Hence, within TiViPE there is no textual programming for the user. TiViPE strongly re-uses code, which is inherent to visual programming, and automatic code regeneration by com-pounding a network of modules to a single module, which leads to faster programming. TiViPE supports network-ing and parallel processing in a natural way, and allows the user to modify an activated network. TiViPE also aims at rapid prototyping which demands user friendliness, pro-gramming by existing modules for basic users, and focuses on the documentation of a module. TiViPE has been used in the field of computer vision, robotics, and computational neuroscience.