A Web-Integrated Environment for Component-Based Software Reasoning

This thesis presents the Web IDE, a web-integrated environment for component-based software reasoning. The Web IDE is specifically tailored to emphasize the relationships among various components in component-based software engineering (CBSE) and to facilitate reasoning. It allows students to use RESOLVE, a component-based, integrated specification and programming language, to build components and systems, providing real-time feedback that can be used to reason about the correctness of their component implementations. Real-time interaction and relationship focused component presentation reinforces CBSE and reasoning principles in a way not possible with traditional programming exercises and file management systems. The Web IDE has gone through several stages of development, getting feedback from users and adding new functionality at each step. It has kept pace with web browser development by incorporating bowser features, such as the file API and local storage, to provide enhanced functionality to users. Several undergraduate software engineering courses at Clemson and elsewhere have successfully used the Web IDE for both reasoning and team-based component development exercises, demonstrating the robust and useful nature of the Web IDE