An Object-Based Visual Scripting Environment

Scripting is a programming technique in which applications are constructed by composing specially designed, pre-packaged software components using a restricted set of scripting operators. Scripting simplifies programming by cutting down the number of the syntactic and semantic features found in a complete programming language, yet is inherently open-ended in that software components can be provided by a separate target language. We explore scripting models in which the basic components are written in an object-oriented target language. We introduce a visual scripting tool as a script development environment. Visual scripts present components and links graphically, and a visual scripting tool supports the construction of scripts through the interactive editing of scripts' graphical counterparts.