Moldable Tools for Object-oriented Development

Object-oriented programming aims to facilitate navigation between domain concepts and the code that addresses those domains by enabling developers to directly model those domain concepts in the code. To make informed decisions developers then formulate detailed and domain-specific questions about their systems in terms of domain concepts, and use tools to explore available information and answer those questions. Development tools however focus mainly on object-oriented idioms and do not expose or exploit domain concepts constructed on top of object-oriented programming idioms. Analysis tools are typically not tightly integrated with development tools. This has a negative effect on program comprehension, increasing the effort and the time for obtaining answers. To improve program comprehension we propose to better integrate domain concepts and program comprehension tools into the development environment through moldable tools. Moldable tools are development tools that are aware of the current development context and support inexpensive creation of domain-specific extensions. We elaborate on the idea of moldable tools and show how to apply moldable tools to support object-oriented programming. Through practical examples we show how developers can embed domain concepts into their development tools.