A multi-user visual object-oriented programming environment

Software systems are growing larger and more complex. The development of a large-scale software system usually requires the collaboration of multiple developers. This paper addresses several desirable features of a practical multi-user, visual object-oriented programming environment (mVOOPE), whose constituent components may be distributed over a long distance, unreliable communication environment such as the Internet. By incorporating three design rationales, more local processing, compact remote communication, and multithreaded collaboration, our mVOOPE makes a trade-off between performance and consistency requirements. The mVOOPE provides programming support with two aspects: visual programming for object-oriented languages and collaborative programming for incremental software development. So far a window-based environment prototype, developed with Visual C++, executes on multiple PCs connected by the network.