Explicit Programming: Improving the Design Vocabulary of Your Program [Demonstration]

Object-oriented systems are frequently built around idioms, design patterns, and other abstractions that can be captured only indirectly in source code. The loss of design information in code often impedes later development activities. Explicit programming attacks this information loss by enabling developers to introduce projectspecific design vocabulary into existing general-purpose languages. Using explicit programming, developers can cost-effectively encode design information in a concrete, encapsulated, and reusable way. In this demonstration, we introduce the principles of explicit programming and demonstrate the ELIDE tool, which supports explicit programming in Java. ELIDE allows developers to introduce new, parameterized modifiers into the Java language at the class, field, method and block levels. Newly defined modifiers trigger a series of transformations on the source code. Transformations are defined in Java code and can create or modify code anywhere in the source tree. We also describe several applications of explicit programming to increase the design content of systems.