Design, construction, and application of a generic visual language generation environment

The implementation of visual programming languages (VPLs) and their supporting environments is time-consuming and tedious. To ease the task, researchers have developed some high-level tools to reduce the development effort. None of these tools, however, can be easily used to create a complete visual language in a seamless way as the lex/yacc tools do for textual language constructions. This paper presents the design, construction and application of a generic visual language generation environment, called VisPro. The VisPro design model improves the conventional model-view-controller framework in that its functional modules are decoupled to allow independent development and integration. The VisPro environment consists of a set of visual programming tools. Using VisPro, the process of VPL construction can be divided into two steps: lexicon definition and grammar specification. The former step defines visual objects and a visual editor, and the latter step provides language grammars with graph rewriting rules. The compiler for the VPL is automatically created according to the grammar specification. A target VPL is generated as a programming environment which contains the compiler and the visual editor. The paper demonstrates how VisPro is used by building a simple visual language and a more complex visual modeling language for distributed programming.