A Fully Integrated Development Environment for Agent-Oriented Programming

Different knowledge representation tasks require different knowledge representation techniques. Agent designers should therefore be able to easily exploit benefits of various knowledge representation technologies in a single agent system.I describe here a modular agent programming language Jazzyk based on the programming framework of Behavioural State Machines (BSM). BSM framework, and thus also Jazzyk, draws a strict distinction between a knowledge representational and a behavioural level of an agent program. It supports a high degree of modularity w.r.t. employed KR technologies, and at the same time provides a clear and concise semantics.

Programming is an important course for any IT or engineering-related course. However, previous research shows that students face difficulties in learning programming due to its abstract concepts. This study aims to evaluate the acceptance of a developed Integrated Development Environment (IDE), namely C-SOLVIS which is a web-based application that specifically intends to facilitate the teaching and learning of the C programming fundamentals in Malaysian tertiary education. The C-SOLVIS integrates problem-solving into a program development environment for the C language. The goal is to guide the users in problem-solving and help them write C programs based on problem-solving algorithms. The Rapid Application Development (RAD) Model was employed in the C-SOLVIS development process. Based on this model, the requirement planning phase was carried out through the triangulation technique by applying qualitative approaches comprising a literature review supported by semi-structured interviews, document reviews, and content validation by expert programming lecturers. Subsequently, the design of the application was accomplished through the iterative prototyping process which was then followed by the application construction. Then, the C-SOLVIS is deployed to be used by several programming lecturers to evaluate its usability by adopting a quantitative method using the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire. The study has discovered several suitable techniques and designs for the problem-solving and program development environment. For the problem-solving environment, the Computational Thinking (CT) concepts were applied which were supported by the Input-Process-Output (IPO) Model through Scientific Instructions and Inquiries. Meanwhile, the program development environment was designed and developed based on frame-based programming using a set of developed Code Patterns. The C-SOLVIS evaluation using the SUS instrument has yielded a SUS mean score of 86.07. This score is interpreted by SUS as an A grade that indicates C-SOLVIS as a highly usable application and thus is accepted for C programming learning. Hence, the development process of the C-SOLVIS can be used as a guideline for educational software development, especially in the field of programming education.

Distributed software development is becoming a common practice among developers. Factors such as the development environments improvement, their extensibility, and the emergence of social networking software are leading factors. They lead the development process (both co-located and geographically distributed) to a practice that: 1) improves the team’s productivity, and 2) encourages and supports the social interaction among the teams’ members. The above factors along with the distributed development emergence, Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) evolution, and the social media advances got the attention of the software development teams, and made them consider how to better assist the social nature of software developers, and the social aspects of software development, including activity awareness of team members’ progress, their presence, collaboration, communication, and coordination around shared artifacts. IDEs are the most commonly used tools by developers and programmers. Integrating the most needed development tools inside the IDE, makes it a Collaborative Development Environment (CDE), and embedding a variety of social software features within a CDE helps support distributed development teams. It also creates a new genera of tools called Social Development Environments or “SDEs” as it is commonly called. This article discusses the origins and development of “SDEs”. It reflects and presents the research into development environments, explaining their role in supporting the communication and coordination needs of development teams. Also, it presents the effect of embedding social network features in such environments. It presents some emerging SDEs and future work. Finally, it concludes by introducing a new model named 5-star that classifies, and helps to evaluate and compare the collaborative tools. 5-star presents a new way to compare and evaluate the SDE systems based on their supported features. It bases the comparison on five major categories including: Communication, Coordination, Collaboration, Awareness & Presence, and Social networking (SN) tools.

Responding to the fact that software systems become more and more complex and mutable, not only the software-standards-related technologies should be adopted, but the environments for software development and evolution should also be flexible and integratable. These facts make software development and maintenance difficult and costly. In this chapter, we first illustrate the activities and studies for software standards, processes, CASE toolsets, and environments. Then, we propose a process and an environment for evolution-oriented software development, called the PRocess and Agent-based Integrated Software development Environment (PRAISE). PRAISE advocates software development with popular software methodologies, and it uses an XML-based mechanism to unify the various paradigms with different standards. It integrates processes, roles, toolsets, and work products to make software development more efficient. With PRAISE, users are encouraged to adopt familiar mechanisms and formal approaches as they wish. PRAISE maintains the consistency of the paradigms so that users do not need to worry about conflicts with other paradigms that are built in or added later. PRAISE meets the need for evolving software development and maintenance.

Responding to the fact that software systems become more and more complex and mutable, not only the software-standards-related technologies should be adopted, but the environments for software development and evolution should also be flexible and integratable. These facts make software development and maintenance difficult and costly. In this chapter, we first illustrate the activities and studies for software standards, processes, CASE toolsets, and environments. Then, we propose a process and an environment for evolution-oriented software development, called the PRocess and Agent-based Integrated Software development Environment (PRAISE). PRAISE advocates software development with popular software methodologies, and it uses an XML-based mechanism to unify the various paradigms with different standards. It integrates processes, roles, toolsets, and work products to make software development more efficient. With PRAISE, users are encouraged to adopt familiar mechanisms and formal approaches as they wish. PRAISE maintains the consistency of the paradigms so that users do not need to worry about conflicts with other paradigms that are built in or added later. PRAISE meets the need for evolving software development and maintenance.

When an agent program exhibits unexpected behaviour, a developer needs to locate the fault by debugging the agent’s source code. The process of fault localisation requires an understanding of how code relates to the observed agent behaviour. The main aim of this paper is to design a source-level debugger that supports single-step execution of a cognitive agent program. Cognitive agents execute a decision cycle in which they process events and derive a choice of action from their beliefs and goals. Current state-of-the-art debuggers for agent programs provide insight in how agent behaviour originates from this cycle but less so in how it relates to the program code. As relating source code to generated behaviour is an important part of the debugging task, arguably, a developer also needs to be able to suspend an agent program on code locations. We propose a design approach for single-step execution of agent programs that supports both code-based as well as cycle-based suspension of an agent program. This approach results in a concrete stepping diagram ready for implementation and is illustrated by an implementation of a source-level debugger for the GOAL agent programming language in the Eclipse development environment.

Processing, besides being a language of sorts, is an integrated development environment (IDE)—an IDE created by artists for artists. The Processing development environment is simple to learn and use, and doesn’t add to the complexity of learning to program, as with many other IDEs. In fact, the Processing IDE really does substantially simplify the process of coding, even for absolute beginners. Even Flash, which is another very popular IDE of sorts, also geared toward artists, has a steep learning curve, and its complexity can get in the way on pure coding projects. In contrast, the Processing IDE has a well-designed interface and core functionality that allows you to work efficiently; it’s a huge improvement over working in your old text editorKeywordsVirtual MachineProcessing EnvironmentText EditorJava Virtual MachineJava ApplicationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Software is rapidly moving from the desktop to the Web. The Web provides a generic user interface that allows ubiquitous access, instant collaboration, integration with other online services, and avoids installation and configuration on desktop computers. For software development, the Web presents a shift away from developer workstations as a silo, and has the promise of closer collaboration and improved feedback through innovations in Web-based interactive development environments (IDEs). Moving IDEs to the Web is not just a matter of porting desktop IDEs; a fundamental reconsideration of the IDE architecture is necessary in order to realize the full potential that the combination of modern IDEs and the Web can offer. This paper discusses research challenges and opportunities in this area, guided by a pilot study of a web IDE implementation.

We describe some of the novel aspects and motivations behind the design and implementation of the Ciao multiparadigm programming system. An important aspect of Ciao is that it provides the programmer with a large number of useful features from different programming paradigms and styles, and that the use of each of these features can be turned on and off at will for each program module. Thus, a given module may be using e.g. higher order functions and constraints, while another module may be using objects, predicates, and concurrency. Furthermore, the language is designed to be extensible in a simple and modular way. Another important aspect of Ciao is its programming environment, which provides a powerful preprocessor (with an associated assertion language) capable of statically finding non-trivial bugs, verifying that programs comply with specifications, and performing many types of program optimizations. Such optimizations produce code that is highly competitive with other dynamic languages or, when the highest levels of optimization are used, even that of static languages, all while retaining the interactive development environment of a dynamic language. The environment also includes a powerful auto-documenter. The paper provides an informal overview of the language and program development environment. It aims at illustrating the design philosophy rather than at being exhaustive, which would be impossible in the format of a paper, pointing instead to the existing literature on the system.

Many Integrated Development Environment (IDE) can be used to create Android Apps. Android Studio with Java programming language is an IDE and native programming language that is officially supported by Google. As a supported IDE, AS becomes the best IDE that can be used to build apps. Nevertheless, many novice programmers find it difficult to get started especially by starting a new programming concept for mobile devices. Android Studio is also known as an IDE that requires a high specs computer requirement and also has sophisticated features. This research purposed to develop applications with IDEs that are more user-friendly and more emphasize the big concept of programming without much difficulty regarding compiling the program code and also the complexity of IDE as well as Android Studio. The IDE used in this study is App Inventor 2 (AI2), a cloud-based IDE managed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The next goal is to test the capabilities of the application by conducting Blackbox Testing and User Testing. In this research has been developed an app called Receptionist that is used to test the ability of the codes generated by AI2. The results show that AI2 can be used to build complex applications such as Text Message Service (SMS) broadcasting, performing local database queries and retrieving data on the server. However, some features such as database processing should run in the background still run on the UI thread, thereby reducing the user experience when Application Not Responding (ANR) occurs. Keywords: App Inventor 2, Android Application, Cloud Programming, visual programming

The ULowell Data Flow Project combines dataflow hardware, dataflow software, and a data flow development environment. The hardware component, a data flow coprocessor card, utilizes seven NEC 7281 Image Pipelined Processors. Each chip models a static dataflow computation and is programmable. The coprocessor was designed and implemented by ULowell personnel and uses an AMIGA 2000 as a host. The software component currently consists of a library of data flow image processing algorithms and an evolving software development environment. Currently the image processing library includes typical imaging operations such as: edge enhancement, filtering, histogramming, and affine transformation. The software development environment (SDE) is depicted in Figure 1. The SDE contains a Data Flow Graph Editor which programmers use to design their data flow code. The data flow algorithm can then be converted directly into NEC data flow assembly code which is then assembled using the ULowell Data Flow Assembler. The assembler differs from NEC's assembler in that it can produce relocatable code. The object code output of the assembler is given to the Data Flow Resource Manager. The resource manager monitors the available resources within the chips. Thus, if a single process does not totally utilize a chip's table space or memory, then a second process may be concurrently loaded onto the same chip. The ability to have multiple data flow processes coexisting within a single chip is unique to the ULowell environment. The data flow resource manager can download and monitor code to either the hardware or to a software simulator/debugger. The simulator/debugger can monitor and trace data flow tokens as they proceed through the chip. Output of the simulator/debugger can be fed back into the data flow graph editior to visually trace token flow through the original program design. The last component of our SDE is a High Level Language translator which can compile programs written in SISAL, a high level language for parallel computation, down to NEC 7281 assembly language. We have already implemented the relocatable assembler, and the data flow resource manager. Prototype versions of the high level translator, simulator/debugger and graph/editor are currently being implemented.

Pipeline image processing systems are increasingly being used in industrial vision systems, in particular in manufacture visual inspection. There has been little work done in the study of the appropriate software environment for rapid program development for these machines. In this paper, an approach to improve software programmability of these systems was proposed. The software features reflecting the hardware capabilities as well as the nature of image processing applications were discussed. A preprocessor was developed to support the high level programming environment and the abstract data structures. The preprocessor also analyzed the image processing tasks expressed as expressions and generate the hardware setup and connections necessary for multipass operations through the pipeline processor. A prototype implementation of the preprocessor and an example were also discussed.

Evaluation of integrated software development environments: Challenges and results from three empirical studies

In this paper, we propose the components and an effective integrated development environment (IDE) of an Open software Platform for Robotic Services (OPRoS) that covers from the control of H/W devices to the execution of complicated application programs. Standardized components with data, service, and event ports are offered for developing robot S/W applications easily and efficiently by just combining several components in proper ways. Some design patterns are also provided for general reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems in developing the robot S/W applications. For an all-level development environment, the IDE of the OPRoS supports the development from low-level device controls to high-level contents composition. It turns out that, as a comprehensive platform for robot S/W applications, the proposed OPRoS provides convenient environments for all development steps from editing to execution.

This paper proposes a cloud application framework, which integrates both the development and production environment seamlessly. The framework consists of the client-side integrated development environment (IDE), and the server-side service portfolio and cloud controller. The IDE has requirement definition, architecture design and application prototyping tools, and it can simulate execution of large-scale applications in developers' PCs. The service portfolio incorporates data from these tools and enables automatic data sharing between them, thereby avoiding setback and redundancy. To accommodate the applications on the cloud, the cloud controller utilizes the resource structures designed in the IDE and generates virtual machines (VMs) from templates, in which a verified OS and middleware for large-scale data processing are packaged. The behavior of VMs and applications will be automatically monitored and catalogued as a guideline for the next project. With these comprehensive approaches, the system integration methods can be streamlined and the acceleration of development can be easily demonstrated.