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Patterns of Visual Programming

Tutorial 75 minutes

Can design patterns untangle your visual spaghetti?

Dave Parsons

Mark Cranshaw

Visual programming tools have become increasingly common in recent years and will no doubt become more so in the future. One of the questions most often raised by those new to visual programming is 'how do I keep control of my visual spaghetti?' or words to that effect. This tutorial is an attempt to answer that question by suggesting some visual programming patterns that can be reused to effectively manage visual development. The context for demonstrations will be bean programming with VisualAge for Java, but many of the patterns are transferable to other visual programming contexts.

Dave Parsons (dparsons@objectpeople.com)

The Object People

Dave Parsons is currently a senior consultant/trainer with The Object People. He has been teaching and writing about object technology since 1991, and has published student-oriented textbooks on C++ and Java for Letts educational (London). He gained his Ph.D. for work on an extensible object oriented architecture for a graphical electronic circuit design system. His current research interests are design pattern metrics and visual programming. His conference activities have included presentations at OT96, 97 and 98 and co-organising a workshop at ECOOP 99.

Mark Cranshaw (mark.cranshaw@solent.ac.uk)

Southampton Institute

Mark Cranshaw is a senior lecturer in the Systems Engineering faculty of Southampton Institute. He has a wide experience of object technology and has lectured in Smalltalk, C++ and Java. He currently specialises in HCI and visual Java development.

Topics

Benefits

This tutorial will benefit anyone either currently using a visual programming tool or intending to use one in the future, by providing a toolkit of readily reusable visual design patterns. In this way they may avoid some of the pitfalls of learning and using a visual programming environment.

Session: Tutorial 75 minutes Level: intermediate
Audience: It is not essential that participants will already be using a visual programming tool, since the tutorial will also serve as an introduction to visual programming. The only prerequisite is that attendees are interested in visual programming tools.

Max no maximum

Material

The documentation will consist primarily of example visual programs, giving both the anti-pattern (illustrating the problem) and the visual design pattern (suggesting the design solution). The specific examples are all in the context of the VisualAge for Java environment, but many of the patterns can also be applied to less sophisticated visual programming tools

Delivery

A web site will be set up in advance containing information about the patterns presented at the tutorial. This will be updated after the session with any new patterns, ideas or comments that arise from the tutorial. Some poster based material is also expected to be generated during the tutorial

Format

The tutorial will begin as a presentation but move quickly towards group (paper-based) exercises that will allow the participants to explore the anti-patterns and perhaps suggest design pattern solutions. It is hoped that the participants themselves will identify additional design patterns during the session

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