The Snippet Platform Architecture – Dynamic and Interactive Compound Documents

Abstract

Abstract-Compound documents in desktop environments face many issues and limitations in terms of modularity and genericity with regard to their representation and handling. The Snippet Platform natively supports highly dynamic and interactive compound documents. The contents of a document are not limited to combinations of traditional types like text, images, vector objects, or videos, but are completely generic and thus may even consist of fully-functional embedded applications. These can be operated in-place, enabling a higher level of interactivity. Moreover, complex dependencies within or in between documents are supported. The component-based architecture of the Snippet Platform allows for keeping these in a consistent working state. It realizes application software by an extensible set of functional modules that are designed to interoperate. These may also be combined for performing more advanced transformations on contents or defining more refined algorithmic dependencies. A fine-granular model, based on so-called Snippets instead of files, ensures the persistent representation of such compound documents and their dependencies. A working prototype, also discussed in this paper, incorporates all these aspects.Index Terms-Data management, document engineering, dynamic compound documents.

Integrating approaches for feature implementation

“…Moreover, our approach is closely related to projectional editors, where a developer directly modifies the AST instead of a temporary representation (i.e., concrete syntax) [23]. Yet, in contrast to classical tool-centric approaches such as IPE [19] and MPS 1 , we pursue a document-centric approach on top of the snippet system [17] [18].…”

Separating features using colored snippet graphs

“…In prior work, Kirsch et al presented the snippet system, a novel operating-system environment that involves a flexible fine-granular document model, the so-called snippet model [19] [20]. The snippet system supports reuse and interrelation of various content such as text, slide shows, videos, mind maps and vector objects.…”

“…In summary, we make the following contributions: (1) we point out how the snippet system [19] [20] can be employed in (feature-oriented) software development; (2) we propose a novel concept for separating features using snippets, ASTs and coloring; (3) we present our ideas for handling ordering issues on demand during development; (4) we lay ground for a snippet-based integration of compositional and annotative approaches by unifying their underlying representations.…”

“…Thereby, we omit classical directories and files and build our approach upon snippets [19] [20], coloring [15] [4] and abstract syntax trees (ASTs). Comparable to directories and files, yet with advantages regarding reusability, we propose a set of units organizing the unified representation of the source code in a feature-oriented manner.…”