Supporting Reuse of Evolving Visual Code

Although the idea of reusing code is very appealing, effective reuse has long been acknowledged as a problem. To help address the difficulties, many advocate strong management commitment to code reuse, leading to the treatment of code as an asset to be carefully managed in a well-organized repository. However, the advent of the Web may bring a change to this outlook, encouraging informal, loosely-organized code repositories. Already, for both textual and visual languages, informal repositories are beginning to emerge, featuring a high rate of change and few controls over what a producer must do to submit code. In this paper, we present techniques to address some aspects of code reuse in this kind of informal, evolving environment. These techniques build upon characteristics found in many visual programming languages. Using these techniques, our approach is able to eliminate the special work traditionally required of the producer, while still supporting the consumer’s reuse efforts within these immature, evolving repositories.