Visual development of hierarchical components

Componenent systems allow development of new applications by assembling existing components together to form a desired result. General purpose components can be reused for development of different applications which leads to shorter development time as well as higher quality of developed applications. Good support built-in into user's tools is required for this process. The goal of this thesis is to design and to implement a prototype implementation of IDE tool for SOFA 2.0 distributed hierarchical component system (SOFA IDE). SOFA IDE allows visual development of applications composed of hierarchical components and managing SOFA 2.0 component repository. The implementation is preceded by analysis of SOFA 2.0 component system, user requirements analysis and analysis of possible supportive technologies for the implementation. The prototype implementation of SOFA IDE consists of three integrated parts: (1) SOFA 2.0 Repositories Browser which allows user to manage a content of connected SOFA 2.0 repositories; (2) graphical user interface for easy creating and versioning of components and their elements; (3) Architecture Diagram Editor for visual development of hierarchical components. SOFA IDE tool is implemented as a Eclipse plug-in. The Architecture Diagram Editor part is based on Eclipse GMF project