Visual programming-in-the-large versus visual programming-in-the-small

Abstract

Visual programming research has largely focused on the issues of visual programming-in-the-small. However, entirely different concerns arise when one is programmingin-the-large. We present a visual software engineering environment that allows users to construct visually programs consisting of hierarchically organized networks of components that process streams of arbitrary objects. We discuss the problems that occur when trying to construct systems consisting of thousands of interconnected components, examine how this environment deals with some of the problems specific to visual programming-in-the-large, and show why our initial solutions failed to scale successfully. Finally, we argue that a single visual mechanism called "zooming" addresses these scaling problems and, when suitably augmented, can also support automatic component discovery and intelligent error correction.

A Dataflow-Based Scientific Workflow Composition Framework

“…Given the high-level orchestration and integration nature of scientific workflow composition, a scientific workflow composition model should fall in the programming-in-the-large paradigm. Moreover, since end users are often scientists who will likely work more efficiently with a visual programming environment, we advocate that scientific workflows should adopt the visual programming-in-the-large paradigm [11].…”

Architecture-based runtime software evolution

“…Gorlick et al [13,14] We demonstrate the use of our tool suite using a simple logistics system for routing incoming cargo to a set of warehouses. Figure 3(a) shows the system's user interface.…”

Specifying and Analysing System-Level Inter-Component Interfaces

“…Recent work in software architecture has resulted in the definition of many architecture description languages (ADLs), for example, Darwin [20,21], Rapide [22], SADL [23,24], UniCon [25], and many others [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37]. These languages allow the software designer to specify the components in a software system, the type of interconnections between the components and the configuration of the components and connections.…”