An Object-Oriented Graphical Editor for Distributed Application Development

The increasing use of distributed computer systems leads to an increasingneed for distributed applications. Their development in various domains like of-fice automation or computer integrated manufacturing is not sufficiently sup-ported by current techniques. New software engineering concepts are needed inthe three areas 'languages', 'tools', and 'environments'. We believe that object-oriented techniques and graphics support are key approaches to major achieve-ments in all three areas. As a consequence, we developed a universal object-oriented graphical editor ODE as one of our basic tools (tool building tool).ODE is based on the object-oriented paradigm, with some important extensionslike built-in object relations. It has an extensible functional language which al-lows for customization of the editor. ODE was developed as part of DOCASE, asoftware production environment for distributed applications. The basic ideas ofDOCASE will be presented and the requirements for ODE will be pointed out.Then ODE will be described in detail, followed by a sample customization ofODE: the one for the DOCASE design language