Developing visualizations for graphical software engineering artifacts in Envision

Introduction

The Envision system allows the visualization of arbitrary graphical objects. Some examples of what is possible include: formatted text and HTML, diagrams, tables, flow charts, etc. These are artifacts typical of software engineering which traditionally are separate from source code and only appear in its documentation. Some IDEs try to mask this fact by integrating source code and documentation views side-by-side. In Envision all of these artifacts are part of the same tree data structure that defines the program - the model.

Goal

The goal of the project is to create a number of Envision model extensions and corresponding visualizations for typical artifacts of software engineering as outlined in the examples above. It should be possible to visualize these artifacts on their own or as part of programming constructs. For instance it should be possible to display an image or a table as part of a comment for a method.

Recommended background

Experience in object oriented programming

Opportunities

• Contribute to an open source IDE
• Gain experience with a modular, cross-platform architecture built with the popular Qt framework
  

Contact

Dimitar Asenov