Visualisation for learning OOP, using AOP and eclipse

ABSTRACT

This paper outlines our project to help beginners learn to program by showing object visualisations driven by aspect- oriented programming, and presented as part of the Eclipse development platform. The aspect-oriented programming is part of the infrastructure we use to drive the visualisations that help students learn object-oriented programming. Aspect-oriented programming explicitly supports the kind of cross-cutting concerns that allows our system to drive visualisations that emphasise principles of object interaction. Our extensions to Eclipse allow us to provide this educational scaffolding to help learners, without altering the program, the programming language or the libraries.

REFERENCES

• 1: Robert Biddle , James Noble , Ewan Tempero, Essential use cases and responsibility in object-oriented development, Proceedings of the twenty-fifth Australasian conference on Computer science, p.7-16, January 01, 2002, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
• 2: A. Clement, A. Colyer, and M. Kersten. Aspect-oriented programming with AJDT. In Proceedings of the ECOOP workshop on Analysis of Aspect-Oriented Software (AAOS 2003), 2003.
• 3: W. G. Griswold, Y. Kato, and J. J. Yuan. Aspectbrowser: Tool support for managing dispersed aspects. In Proceedings of the OOPSLA Workshop on Multi-Dimensional Separation of Concerns in Object-oriented Systems, 1999.
• 4: Rilla Khaled , James Noble , Robert Biddle, InspectJ: program monitoring for visualisation using aspectJ, Proceedings of the twenty-sixth Australasian conference on Computer science: research and practice in information technology, p.359-368, February 01, 2003, Adelaide, Australia
• 5: Gregor Kiczales , Erik Hilsdale , Jim Hugunin , Mik Kersten , Jeffrey Palm , William G. Griswold, An Overview of AspectJ, Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, p.327-353, June 18-22, 2001
• 6: A. M. Luxton. JavanOwl: A web-based programming environment. In Proceedings of the Human-Centred Computing Workshop on Programming For The Educationally Disadvantaged, Auckland, 2003.
• 7: Stuart Marshall , Kirk Jackson , Craig Anslow , Robert Biddle, Aspects to visualising reusable components, Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific symposium on Information visualisation, p.81-88, January 01, 2003, Adelaide, Australia
• 8: J. Noble, L. Groves, and R. Biddle. Object oriented program visualisation in Tarraingim. Australian Journal of Computing, 27(4), Nov. 1995.
• 9: Object Technology International Inc. Eclipse Platform Technical Overview. http://eclipse.org/articles/index.html, 2003.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.6 Programming Environments
          Subjects: Integrated environments

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
aspect-orientation, education, software visualisation