Reasoning about object-oriented applications requires developers to answer contextual questions about their domain objects. Tailored development tools can support developers in this activity by providing relevant domain-specific information. Nonetheless, a high effort for extending development tools to handle domain-specific objects, together with diverging mechanisms for creating, sharing and discovering extensions, discourage developers to adapt their tools. To address this, we propose to enable contextual behavior in development tools by allowing domain objects to decide how they are handled in development tools. We show that combining this idea with mechanisms for specifying extensions using internal DSLs can significantly reduce the cost of tailoring development tools to specific domains.

Andrei Chiș is a PhD student at University of Bern in the Software Composition Group. Prior to this, he got a master and a bachelor degree in software engineering from the “Politehnica” University of Timișoara, under the supervision of Radu Marinescu, with theses in the area of software visualisation.

He maintains that development environments have to be moldable, that is, they have to be aware of the application under development and the developer’s tasks and enable rapid and effective customization to new applications and development tasks. His current research focuses on build new solutions that make that vision possible as part of the Glamorous Toolkit team. He is also a contributor to Pharo, a live, Smalltalk-inspired programming language and environment, and Moose, a platform for software and data analysis.