Rapid prototyping of graphical editors in an open SDE

A very important class of tools within a software development environment (SDE) are graphical editors for ERA diagrams, OOA/OOD diagrams, Petri nets and many other net-like models. The construction of these editors and their integration with other tools in the SDE is a very time-consuming effort if the editors are produced from scratch. This paper presents a technique and underlying software systems which allow such editors to be constructed within hours. This is achieved by using an open framework for SDEs with very powerful components: our framework essentially consists of the UIMS ET++, a class library for user interfaces, H-PCTE, an implementation of the object management system of PCTE and a generic database interpreter. The low effort is possible because we extensively exploit functionality which is provided by the UIMS and DBMS and do not re-implement features in the tool code which are already covered by framework components: each editor consists basically of the generic editor, a database schema and C++ code of about one page. The generic interpreter retrieves information about types and the actual document data from the database and interprets them. The tool-specific C++ code associates graphical symbols with object types in the database