This article describes the basic concepts of an extensible customizable knowledge-basedgraphical editor and its adoption to the DOCASE methodology and tool environment. Oneaspect in this field is the mapping of conceptual models (expressed in a specific language)to their graphical representations. This also has impacts to the semantic of the user actionsin a graphical editor tool. The ability to extend and customize the editor can be used tobuild specific graphical interfaces to various kinds of tools in the software developmentprocess. Major aspects of ODE are semantics-directed editing besides normal syntax-directed editing, support of abstraction mechanisms, multiple modeless views to attack com-plexity, semantic analization and animation. The result is an highly customizable graphicaleditor construction set that matches requirements of applications in many domains of systemdesign.
The increasing use of distributed computer systems leads to an increasingneed for distributed applications. Their development in various domains like of-fice automation or computer integrated manufacturing is not sufficiently sup-ported by current techniques. New software engineering concepts are needed inthe three areas 'languages', 'tools', and 'environments'. We believe that object-oriented techniques and graphics support are key approaches to major achieve-ments in all three areas. As a consequence, we developed a universal object-oriented graphical editor ODE as one of our basic tools (tool building tool).ODE is based on the object-oriented paradigm, with some important extensionslike built-in object relations. It has an extensible functional language which al-lows for customization of the editor. ODE was developed as part of DOCASE, asoftware production environment for distributed applications. The basic ideas ofDOCASE will be presented and the requirements for ODE will be pointed out.Then ODE will be described in detail, followed by a sample customization ofODE: the one for the DOCASE design language.