Revision as of 11:53, 14 June 2006

Overview

As a summary we could say that we improve the usability of the most important wizards, e.g. classwizard and featurewizard, by adding new features, extending the user interface and simplifying the handling.

Following the priority list of our project, beginning with the most important aspect of our work

• editor based wizard execution
• combobox for post- and precondition
• pick & drop
• undo/redo functionality within the wizard
• docking the wizard in a fixed window - not a pop-up anymore
• update permanently the editor while using the wizard
• tooltips which provides help
• beginner-tour

Work

Right now, we are occupied with:

• Preparing the graphical interface of the feature- and class-wizard
• design decisions concerning GUI
• finding most important classes in ES that must be changed

Problems

• Debugger is not available yet
• the difficulties with compiling forced us to concentrate only on merging the class- and feature-wizard

TO-DO

• ...

Milestones

M1: April 30, 2006

• editing wikipage
• ES compiled on windows/linux-x86

M2: June 14, 2006

• every team mate succeeded in compiling the newest version of ES
• beginning of the main work: feature- and class-wizard

Project Details

Editor Based Wizard Execution

Motivation

Wizards are usually only accessible through a GUI Window. This is convenient for beginners, but will slow down advanced programmers. So there should be a possibility to access the wizard through the editor directly with an interface similar to a command line interface.

Idea

To execute the wizard within the editor you have to do the following:

• Write the command (possibly over some lines)
• Press a hotkey to execute the command

Which hotkey we use is to be determined.

The goal of the language to express the commands is to be as short and fast typeable as possible. Therefore it refrains from using charactes for which multiple keys must be pressed. As reference, the US-English and Swiss-German keyboard layout is used. The slash '/' is not a one key character on the Swiss-German keyboard, so it can be substituted by '$'

Since the command is only an intermediate format, structure and readability are not considered first priority here.

Example

To create class TEST which is deferred you have to do the following:

• Write "/c test,d ."
• Press the hotkey

Create a class COMPLEX with features real, imag, add and mult, arguments of add and mult are not void by precondition:

• Write

/c complex
d read
d imag
1d add complex toadd,n
1d mult complex tomult,n
.

• press the Hotkey

Lexical Analysis

Token seperators:

• Whitespaces (' ','\n','\r','\t')
• ','
• '/'
• '$' (for Swiss-German keyboards)

The last three are tokens themselves, whitespaces are discarded

Note: '.' does not seperate tokens.

Syntax

As the project is still in a starting phase, the information here is incomplete and could be changed.

The syntax is made easy to parse, since we have not much experience with parsers.

'##' means that the two symbols have no whitespace bewteen

These symbols represent a stream of tokens:

• wizardExecBlock ::= blockStartChar classCreate {featureCreate}* blockEndChar
• classCreate ::= [num_of_parents] ## 'c' className [inheritance-list] [','attribute_list]
• inheritance-list ::= {inheritance_clause}*
• inhertitance_clause ::= {identifier [',' attribute_list]}+
• className ::= identifier
• featureCreate ::= [num_of_arguments] ## return_type name {argument_type argument_name}* [','attribute_list]
• return_type, argument_type ::= type
• name, argument_name ::= identifier

These symbols represent one token:

• blockStartChar ::= '/' | '$'
• blockEndChar ::= '.'
• type ::= {'.' attribute}* identifier [',' attribute_list]
• identifier ::= {letter}*
• attribute_list ::= {attribute}+
• attribute ::= letter
• letter ::= 'a'..'z'
• number ::= digit+
• digit ::= '0'..'9'

Explanation

• Feature creation:
  • If num_of_arguments if not given, the feature is a attribute, otherwise it's a method.
  • If return type is 'v'='void' then it's a procedure.
  • Some mappings/abbreviations from heavily used types are intended. For example 'i'='integer', 's'='string', 'd'='double', 'f'='real'
• Class names are automatically converted to uppercase (it's easier to write all in lowercase)

Working on

• Specify how to do lexical analysis.

Team

• Volkan Arslan (Advisor)
• Christoph Lins (project leader)
• Andreas Hasler (working on updating permanently the editor while using the wizard)
• Timon Hertli (working on editor based wizard execution)
• Peter von Rohr (working on beginner-tour / tooltips)
• David Flatz
• Damien Müllhaupt (docking the wizard)
• Patricio Ronc

if you have questions or constructive criticism concerning our project and this wiki-page then write an Email to the project leader or just join our mailinglist:

es-wiz 'at' origo '.' ethz '.' ch