Design Aspects of the Redwood Programming Environment

Redwood is a development environment that supports drag-and-drop manipulation of programming constructs and visual representation of program structure. Redwood’s architecture and functionality are based on the concept of snippet, defined loosely as a program component that encapsulates both a coding solution and its visual presentation. In addition, snippets support creation of unrestricted code libraries, thus fostering open-source development. This paper presents the motivation for Redwood, briefly overviews its functionality and mode of operation, and then focuses on the concepts underlying its design. Two essential parts of this design are the Snippet Display syntax (SDS) and the Snipplet Language (SL), created by the authors and presented in the paper. Implementation details, examples of use, and several directions of future work are also included in the paper. Index Terms — Development environment, Redwood, snippet, visual programming.