VIS-A-VIS - AN OBJECT-ORIENTED APPLICATION FRAMEWORK FOR GRAPHICAL DESIGN-TOOLS

Many engineering disciplines use graphical notations with defined semantic meaning, such as Petri nets, or structure charts. The diagrams drawn in these notations represent semantic models upon which application-specific operations may be performed. To handle this type of notations and their semantic models comfortably, a graphical editor can support them. As there are many different graphical notations in every discipline, reuse of general editor functionality should be supported and encouraged to save tool building effort. vis-A-vis is an object-oriented framework serving this purpose. However, instead of laying the burden of properly composing those classes on the tool builder's shoulders, vis-A-vis also contains a backbone architecture. In this paper we motivate the construction of vis-A-vis by listing the essential requirements that we had set out for a framework supporting in tool building. The scope of vis-A-vis based tools is defined, and a shea survey of the main concepts of vis-A-vis is given. An example of a System Dynamics graphical notation editor which was built within vis-A-vis illustrates these concepts and shows how little effort a tool builder has to spend to implement an editor.