W. Kandinsky, Landscape with Factory, 1910.

Source Viewer

The Source Viewer is a program to view ASCII files. The files are structured in some ways. For example, these could be C source code files, HTML files, or VRML files.

When it comes to C files, the application should be able to show definitions of all data structures and functions from the places they were used. So a click over a function call will take me to the function definition and backwards.

The qeries can be stored, so I always can retrive the information that I saw yesterday. It is obvious that the source viewer should support regular expressions.

The Source Viewer should be implemented as JavaBeans run-time, design-time environments and JavaBeans components. So it is easy to add support for new programming languages.

The Source Viewer can have an option to search on-line. So you can search not only your local but also use for the same search several web search engines. Thus the Source Viewer should have the ability to post search requests to the search engines, store results, and do the search tuning on the those stored queries. Also it is nice if a user can launch his web broweser with the link that he discovered. These features can fix a flaw in the existing search engines. "The Web today is built on a model of one-shot query : search engines don't let you store previous search results and compare them; search engines don't make it easy to store hits away in folders to be revisited later; search engines do not provide mechanisms that enable you to "pick up where you left off"...research is searching again and again, each time tuning and tweaking to better hone in on interesting lines of inquiry", wrote Soloway Elliot and Raven Wallen in "Does the Internet support student inquiry? Don't ask" in CACM V40, #5, May '97, pp11-16.

Open questions

• Do we have to develop JavaBeans design-time environments or we can use the existing ones?