The Field Programming Environment: A Friendly Integrated Environment for Learning and Development

by Steven P. Reiss

Overview

FIELD has been a remarkably successful research project. The ideas first exhibited in the environment now form the basis for most of the current generation of programming environments, including Hewlett-Packard's Softbench, DEC's FUSE, Sun's Tooltalk, Lucid's Energize, and SGI's Codevision. FIELD pioneered the notion of broadcast messaging as a basis for tool integration. Moreover, many of the other tool concepts introduced in FIELD have made their way into these environments. Thus in discussing the FIELD environment, this book actually explains the inner workings of today's programming environments.
The book will be valuable for those interested in the development of programming tools and environments, as well as serious users of programming environments. It will also be of interest to anyone undertaking a large software project, both by introducing the software tools needed to work on such a project and by demonstrating the concepts of message-based integration which can be applied to a variety of domains.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780792395379
Publisher:	Springer US
Publication date:	12/31/1994
Series:	The Springer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science , #298
Edition description:	1995
Pages:	286
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.24(d)

Table of Contents

1 Integrated Programming Environments.- 1.1 What Is a Programming Environments.- 1.2 Classification of Environments.- 1.3 Objectives in Building Field.- 1.4 Integration Strategies.- 1.5 Overview of the Field Environment.- 2 The FIELD Integration Mechanism.- 2.1 The Message System.- 2.2 Pattern Matching.- 2.3 Message Types.- 2.4 Message Groups.- 2.5 Other Message Facilities.- 2.6 The Msg Program Interface.- 2.7 Comparison To Other Implementations.- 3 The FIELD Policy Service.- 3.1 The Policy Concept.- 3.2 Policy Language Concepts.- 3.3 Sample Policy Programs.- 4 The FIELD Debugger.- 4.1 Overall Debugger Organization.- 4.2 The Message Interface.- 4.3 Messages Generated by the Debugger.- 4.4 The Textual Command Language.- 5 Cross-Referencing in FIELD.- 5.1 The Overall Approach.- 5.2 The Cross-Reference Database System.- 5.3 The Cross-Reference Scanners.- 5.4 The Cross-Reference Server.- 6 FIELD Services.- 6.1 Configuration and Version Control.- 6.2 Program Profiling.- 6.3 Execution Monitoring.- 7 The Brown Workstation Environment.- 7.1 History of Bwe.- 7.2 Basic Bwe Components.- 7.3 Structured Graphics Display.- 7.4 Resource Management.- 8 The Annotation Editor.- 8.1 Annotations.- 8.2 Integrating Annotations and Messages.- 8.3 Permanent Annotations.- 8.4 Annotation Editor Interface.- 9 The Debugger Interface.- 9.1 Overview.- 9.2 DBG.- 9.3 Viewers of Debugger Information.- 9.4 The User Input-Output Viewer.- 10 The Interface for Cross-Referencing.- 10.1 Defining Standard Queries.- 10..2 Query Processing.- 10.3 Interacting with Other Tools.- 11 The Call Graph Browser.- 11.1 Organizing the Data.- 11.2 Browsing Options.- 11.3 Information Window.- 11.4 Animating the Call Graph.- 11.5 Interacting with the Environment.- 12 The Class Hierarchy Browser.- 12.1 What to Display.- 12.2Displaying Large Hierarchies.- 12.3 Class and Member Information.- 12.4 Interacting with the Class Browser.- 13 The Interface to UNIX Profiling Tools.- 13.1 Displaying the Performance Data.- 13.2 Interacting with Xprof.- 14 Configuration and Version Management.- 14.1 Obtaining the Information.- 14.2 Displaying the Dependency Graph.- 14.3 Browsing Options and Commands.- 14.4 Interacting with Other Tools.- 15 Data Structure Display.- 15.1 Getting the Information.- 15.2 Default Display Definitions.- 15.3 User-Defined Display Definitions.- 15.3.1 The APPLE Editor.- 15.3.2 The APPLE User Interface.- 15.4 Examples of Mapping Definitions.- 15.5 Editing Data Structures Graphically.- 16 Monitoring Program Execution.- 16.1 Heap Visualization.- 16.2 Input/Output Visualization.- 16.3 Performance Visualization.- 17 The Control Panel.- 17.1 Defining the Control Panel.- 17.2 Window Management.- 17.3 Common Utilities.- 17.4 Standard Button Commands.- 18 Retrospective.- 18.1 Messaging.- 18.2 General Structure.- 18.3 Graphical Interfaces.- 18.4 Editing.- 18.5 Debugging.- 18.6 Program Database.- 18.7 Experience with the Environment.- 18.8 Conclusion.

Editorial Reviews

In explaining the FIELD programming environment, clarifies many of the tools adopted from it by the current generation of programming environments such as Hewitt-Packard's Sofbench, DEC's FUSE, and Sun's SPARCworks. Discusses the history and evolution of the environment, emphasizing the development of ideas that worked and those that did not; how each of the programming tools work and interact with each other; and the user interfaces, how they are used, why they were chosen, and their strengths and weaknesses. For developers and serious users of programming tools and environments. The FIELD environment is available in source form free on line. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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