Envision

The Envision project aims to create a next generation software development system. It features a visual programming interface that can present a program's structure in a flexible combination of text and graphical objects. The visual representation is coupled with novel interaction techniques to facilitate quick navigation and comprehension of programs. This is crucial in modern software engineering where developers have to deal with large-scale code bases and are subject to information overload from many tools for analysis, verification, testing, debugging, etc.

With Envision we also explore a unified model for object-oriented programs of languages like Java, C++, and Scala. This model is user-extensible and allows for new language constructs to be plugged in. In addition to program code, the model can also contain other important artifacts of software engineering such as tables, graphs, images, documentation. Having this extra data in a single repository together with the program structure allows the creation of useful links between the two.

Envision is written in C++ with the help of the Qt library.

Key Results

Envision is an open source project currently in the early stages of its development. The latest version and issue tracker are hosted on GitHub. The motivation behind the project, the architecture of Envision, and some interesting use cases are explained in this Master's thesis.

Project Members at ETH

Dimitar Asenov

Peter Müller