SmartTools: A Generator of Interactive Environments Tools

Abstract

SmartTools is a development environment generator that provides a structure editor and semantic tools as main features. The well-known visitor pattern technique is commonly used for designing semantic analysis, it has been automated and extended. SmartTools is easy to use thanks to its graphical user interface designed with the Java Swing APIs. It is built with an open architecture convinient for a partial or total integration of SmartTools in other environments. It makes the addition of new software components in SmartTools easy. As a result of the modular architecture, we built a distributed instance of SmartTools which required minimal effort. Being open to the XML technologies offers all the features of SmartTools to any language defined with those technologies. But most of all, with its open architecture, SmartTools takes advantage of all the developments made around those technologies, like DOM, through the XML APIs. The fast development of SmartTools (which is a young project, one year old) validates our choices of being open and generic.The main goal of this tool is to provide help and support for designing software development environments for programming languages as well as application languages defined with XML technologies.

A language independent framework for context-sensitive formatting

“…The expressiveness of these user-defined rules defines the amount of variability that is allowed for defining a formatter. Many formatting systems use some variant of the Box language as an intermediate format [1,2,7,8,25]. The Box language, introduced in [6] for defining user interfaces, has operators that define exactly the two-dimensional relative positions of source code elements such as keywords and identifiers.…”

“…The Box layout abstraction offers a general way of expressing two dimensional formatting and decouples the formatting of back-ends from syntax trees. The pretty-print engines of PPML [1,17] pioneered the use the Box language for formatting source code. Box was extended in [27] and [25] to be able to cope with the details of larger programming languages, such as Pascal and Cobol.…”

Automatic generation of language-based tools using the LISA system

“…The generated environment includes a scanner/parser, a pretty printer, a syntax-directed editor, a type checker, an interpreter and other graphic tools. The SmartTools system [5], a successor of the CENTAUR system, is a development environment generator that provides a compiler/interpreter, a structured editor and other XML related tools. The ASF+SDF environment [12] generates a scanner/parser, a pretty printer, a syntax-directed editor, a type checker, an interpreter, and a debugger from algebraic specifications.…”

“…Although previous efforts have explored the concept of automatic generation of language-based tools [2] [3] [4] [1] [5], this paper contributes a more general approach that identifies generic (fixed) and specific (variable) parts from which language-based tools can be generated automatically from language specifications. In many cases, the language specification must be extended, or appropriate information extracted, in order to be able to automatically generate a language-based tool.…”

Accelerating the creation of customized, language-Specific IDEs in Eclipse

“…Examples include the Synthesizer Generator (Reps and Teitelbaum 1984), the ASF+SDF MetaEnvironment (van den Brand et al 2001), and SmartTools (Attali et al 2001). In this approach, meta-tools consume a specification of the syntax and (possibly) semantics of the language, and generate tools such as parsers, compilers, interpreters, and debuggers.…”