Hyper-Programming in Java

Hyper-Programming in Java E. Zirintsis, V.S. Dunstan, G.N.C. Kirby & R. Morrison Department of Mathematical and Computational Sciences, University of St Andrews, North Haugh, St Andrews KY16 9SS, Scotland Email: {vangelis, graham, ron}@dcs.st-and.ac.uk Abstract Hyper-programming is a technology only available in persistent systems, since hyper-program source code contains both text and links to persistent objects. A hyper-programming system has already been prototyped in the persistent program- ming language Napier88. Here we report on the transfer of that technology to an

object-oriented platform, Java. The component technologies required for hyper- programming include linguistic reflection, a persistent store, and a browsing mecha- nism, all of which have been reported elsewhere. The topics of discussion here are the additional technologies of: the specification of denotable hyper-links in Java; a mechanism for preserving hyper-links over compilation; a hyper-program editor; and the integration of the editor and the browser with the hyper-programming user inter- face. We describe their design and implementation. In total, these technologies con- stitute a hyper-programming system in Java. 1 Introduction In persistent systems, programs may be composed and stored in the same environment as that in which they are executed. At the time of program composition, objects accessed by a program may already be available in the persistent store. Since the program itself is a persistent object, it can include direct links to such objects rather than textual descriptions of how to locate the objects. A program containing both text and links to objects is called a hyper-program [1]. Figure 1 shows an example hyper-program that contains a link to another persistent object. The analogy with hyper-text is made by the links being displayed as buttons. The programmer can follow these...

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