Visual Programming Development Environment (VISDE)

Ten years ago large software systems were on the order of hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Today's large software systems are order of magnitude larger. With computer hardware becoming faster with each successive generation, more technically complex problems are being solved in software. The growth in complexity and size of these software systems have led to problems in testing and manageability of the software. Visual programming provides a way to reduce the complexity of software. Visual programming reduces the size of a software system from millions of lines of code to tens of thousands of visual elements. It does this by encapsulating primitive functionality of code within graphical objects and allows the programmer position the icon, tying each programming icon together with a specified interface. By using an icon-driven, graphical drag-and-drop metaphor popularized by some of the current visual programming tools, the software development environment will be usable by nonprogrammers. To provide flexibility and expressiveness, the development environment will be built on top of a flexible scaffolding allowing the software designer to add or replace items within this scaffolding. This is accomplished by using a state-of-the-art programming metaphor called component programming.