LSW Look-And-Feel-Programming-Lab ( LSW-LAFPL ) is our Visual-Programming Environment. It was inspired by PARTS Workbench from VSE and IBM's VMT ( Visual Modeling Technique ).
LSW-LAFPLis an ongoing development. It differs from the mentioned systems in:
VP Systems lack's often layout support - after having created some real nice Programs using VMT you end up dragging the components. So VP reduces it's applicability to support GUI development. We are fascinated by VP and applied it successfully to different areas:
We paid a lot of attention on integration of layout-tools. And we used our LSW-GL, which contains a Graph Drawing toolkit.
VP often destroys a basic advantage of Smalltalk - it's incremental development facility. You can add and change methods without loosing your Objects. Maybe Smalltalkers are not aware that this is a big advantage. In most Java's you have the obsolete edit-compile-run cycle.
VP environments often generate code and destroy the incremental development facility. In a VP environment you need to close your GUI if you want to replace some component with another. So VP environments introduces the obsolete edit-compile-run cycle.
We focused much on tracking down this problem in LS-LAFPL .
We support code generation for a lot of different Scenarios. So after having done a VP-Work you push a button and get Java, C++, Basic or SQL and DHTML/XML/XSL.
To make some tools for internal use in a small-firm is different than to prepare it to be published to a big community.