The ISI visual design editor generator

The benefits of "domain specific" languages and development environments are widely recognized. Constructing an environment for a new domain, however, remains a costly activity, requiring expertise in several areas of software development as well as in the targeted domain. The ISI design editor generator and design environment comprises novel infrastructure that simplifies this task, producing visual domain-specific design environments. This paper presents the runtime architecture of these environments, a visual "specify-by-example" capability that deals with a major portion of editor generation, and an implementation that uses a COTS product (Microsoft PowerPoint) as both graphic middleware and end-user GUI.