Arun Lakhotia
The Center for Advanced Computer Studies
The University of Southwestern Louisiana
Lafayette, LA 70506, USA
+1 (318) 482-6766
arun@cacs.usl.edu
This paper presents an overview of the DIME environment (DIrect Manipulation Environment) being developed by the author. The paper presents the DIME vision, its catalogue of evolutionary transformations---program transformations used by programmers during software maintenance---and scenarios of how they may be used by a programmer during software maintenance. The DIME system will provide for programmers what programmers provide for other computer users: a simple, intuitive, yet powerful way to transform data with the click of a mouse. It will place at the programmer's finger-tips---figuratively speaking---rigorous, formal transformations for creating, composing, analyzing, and modifying the architecture of a software system. Using DIME a programmer will radically overhaul the architecture of a software system just by point-and-click and drag-and-drop with the guarantee that the external behavior of the system is unchanged.
Copyright 1998 IEEE. Published in the Proceedings of IWPC'98, 24-26 June 1998 in Ischia, Italy.
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