Towards a Generic Infrastructure for Framework-Specific Integrated Development Environment Extensions

Object-oriented frameworks are often difficult to use. Framework-specific extensions to integrated development environments (IDEs) aim to mitigate the difficulty by offering tools that leverage the knowledge about framework’s application programming interfaces (APIs). These tools commonly offer support for code visualization, automatic and interactive code generation, and code validation. Current practices, however, require such extensions to be custom-built manually for each supported framework. In this paper, we propose an approach to building framework-specific IDE extensions based on framework-specific modeling languages (FSMLs). We show how the definitions of different FSMLs can be interpreted in these extensions to provide advanced tool support for different framework APIs that the FSMLs are designed for.