Abstract
Smalltalk is not only an object-oriented programming language; it is also known for its extensive integrated development environment supporting interactive and dynamic programming. While the default tools are adequate for browsing the code and developing applications, it is often cumbersome to extend the environment to support new language constructs or to build additional tools supporting new ways of navigating and presenting source code. In this paper, we present the OmniBrowser, a browser framework that supports the definition of browsers based on an explicit metamodel. With OmniBrowser a domain model is described in a graph and the navigation in this graph is specified in its associated metagraph. We present how new browsers are built from predefined parts and how new tools are easily described. The browser framework is implemented in the Squeak Smalltalk environment. This paper shows several concrete instantiations of the framework: a remake of the ubiquitous Smalltalk System Browser, and a coverage browser.
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation Recast (SNF 2000-061655.00/1), the Cook ANR french projects and the Science Foundation Ireland and Lero - the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre.
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Bergel, A., Ducasse, S., Putney, C., Wuyts, R. (2007). Meta-driven Browsers. In: De Meuter, W. (eds) Advances in Smalltalk. ISC 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4406. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71836-9_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71836-9_7
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