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Virtual
Library
Computing
Visual Languages and Visual Programming
This page is maintained on a purely voluntary basis by
Bertrand Ibrahim
<Bertrand.Ibrahim@cui.unige.ch>, Visual Programming
and Software engineering group, University
of Geneva. The maintenance effort is partly funded by the Swiss National
Science Foundation.
This page is accessible at the following alternative (and equivalent) URLs:
http://cui.unige.ch/Visual/
http://cuisung.unige.ch/Visual/
http://cui.unige.ch/eao/www/Visual/Visual.Programming.biblio.html
http://cuisung.unige.ch/Visual/Visual.Programming.biblio.html
and (to save network bandwidth) in gzip compressed format at:
http://cui.unige.ch/Visual/index.html.gz
http://cuisung.unige.ch/Visual/index.html.gz
http://cui.unige.ch/Visual/Visual.Programming.biblio.html.gz
Most recent update: June 20, 2001 (a list of
changes is available)
New: The 2001 IEEE Symposium
on Human-Centric Computing Languages and Environments (Note:
this new conference series replaces the Visual Languages Symposia)
Table of Contents
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You
will find very extensive information about Visual Languages and Visual
Programming in the Comp.Lang.Visual
Frequently Asked Questions posted by David McIntyre.
Places to look for the FAQ:
The VL Symposia
Gerry McKiernan maintains a page
called
"The
Big Picture" on "Visual Browsing in Web and non-Web
Databases".
For those interested in the
role of diagrammatic representations in human thought processes, there is
the Diagrammatic
Reasoning Web site.
There
is also an index of HCI-related
material on the Web, at Delft University
of Technology. See also the HCI
bibliography site.
Catherine Letondal's
list
of resources on Computer-Human Interaction and End-User Programming
Resources
Howie
Goodell's list of resources
on end-user programming
The VISUAL-L mailing list is a mailing list on "Visual
Interaction Design" (special interest area of SIGCHI focusing on the visual
aspects of interaction in interface design). To subscribe to the "Visual
Interaction Design" mailing list, send email to
LISTSERV@VTVM1.CC.VT.EDU with the single line:
subscribe VISUAL-L <your name>
in the body. To unsubscribe, send mail to the same address with the single
line:
signoff VISUAL-L
in the body. To communicate with members of the Visual Interaction Design
community, send email to visual-l@vtvm1.cc.vt.edu
The GRAGRA mailing list is a mailing list on "Graph Grammars".
To subscribe to the "GRAGRA" mailing list, send email to
majordomo@i3.informatik.rwth-aachen.de with the single line:
subscribe gragra <your name>
in the body. To unsubscribe, send mail to the same address with the single
line:
signoff GRAGRA
in the body. To communicate with members of the Graph Grammars community,
send email to gragra@i3.informatik.rwth-aachen.de
For
those interested in Multimedia, there is a
Multimedia section
in the WWW Virtual Library, and a somewhat outdated list of
multimedia information
sources at GMD in Germany.
Elisabeth Freeman also used to maintains a document on
Visual Programming Languages (somewhat outdated).
Henry Lieberman and David Maulsby
maintain the
Programming
by Example home page
Audrey Tam maintains a site on
Visual Information Systems.
Open
Directory's page on Visual Languages
Yahoo's
page on Visual Languages
Lycos'
page on Visual Languages
AltaVista's
page on Visual Languages (looks like an older copy of Lycos' page)
WebCrawler's
page on Visual Languages
Galaxy's
page on Visual Languages
Google's
page on Visual Languages
I
have started collecting pointers to Petri
Net-related resources
(Where
has this been moved?? Where is Roland Hübscher now?)
Problem-Centered
Visual Language Benchmarks (resulting from the
Child's Play
workshop). It serves as repository of benchmarks for the visual languages
and the end user programming community.
Brad
Myers' list of
User
Interface Software Tools
M.
Burnett and M. Baker's
classification
of visual programming languages
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CHI 2002, Minneapolis,
Minnesota, USA, April 20-25, 2002. (deadline for papers: Sep. 14, 2001)
-
Colloque Francophone sur la
Modélisation des Systèmes Réactifs (MSR 2001), Toulouse,
France, October 17-19, 2001. (deadline for papers: Mar. 1, 2001)
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The 2001 IEEE Symposium on Human-Centric Computing Languages
and Environments (HCC '01), Stresa, Italy, September 5-7, 2001. (deadline
for papers: Mar. 11, 2001)
-
Journal of Visual Languages
and Computing: Special issue on Multimedia Languages for the World Wide
Web (deadline for papers: Apr. 15, 2001; tentative publication date: December
2001). Guest editors: Angela Guercio <ma@dia.unisa.it>, Thimothy Arndt
<arndt@cis.csuohio.edu>.
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IHM-HCI 2001, Lille, France, September
10-14, 2001. (deadline for papers: Jan. 26, 2001)
Former conferences
-
GXL: Graph Exchange Language. See
also WoSEF, Workshop
on Standard Exchange Format
-
XGMML: eXtensible Graph
Markup and Modeling Language (XML DTD and schema)
-
GML: Graph Modelling
Language
The following list is in reverse chronological order of insertion, i.e.
new items are added to the top of the list
-
GRAFCET, from which
the Sequential Fonctional Chart formalism is derived, is a visual
modelling formalism for sequential system control.
-
Eidola is an experiment at building a
representation-independent, object-oriented, visual programming language.
It is currently at a somewhat embryonic stage.
-
Thomas Green has done
a lot of research on congnitive aspects of programming languages, including
visual programming languages.
-
KOGGE, KOblenz
Generator for Graphical Environments, is a metaCASE-tool, i.e. a tool for
generating CASE-tools. The formal description for KOGGE tools is done by
using visual languages.
-
The research group on
Database
and Information Systems, Mathematics/Computer Science Department of the
University of Paderborn, conducts research on
Graph-Based
Syntax and Semantics of Visual Modeling Techniques
-
The Research Group on
Theoretical
Computer Science, Department
of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bremen, has a couple
projects related to Graph Transformations:
GETGRATS
and
APPLIGRAPH.
They also have
CollageVR
(generation of three-dimensional scenes by collage grammars),
GRACEland
( a VR development suite for the graph and rule centered language GRACE)
and TREEBAG
(a tree-based generator for objects of various kinds).
-
GRAPHIT:
Graphical Support and Integration of Formal and Semi-Formal Methods for Software
Specification and Development is a project of the
Theoretical Computer
Science / Formal Specification Group (TFS),
Computer Science
Department, Berlin Technical University.
-
OpenMusic is an
icon-oriented data-flow visual programming language based on Common Lisp
to create musical pieces. Currently, the environment can only be compiled
on the Macintosh.
-
Software Visualization Research in KMi
and their ISVL - Internet
Software Visualization Lab.
-
HANK: A graphical
cognitive modelling language for novices
-
DOME is an extensible
system for graphically developing, analyzing and transforming models of systems
and software. DOME comes with a pre-built set of notations which can be used
'out of the box' including UML, Coad-Yourdon OOA, Colbert OOSD, IDEF0, and
Petri-Nets. The core of DOME, however, is its capability to develop new
notations.
-
The GRIP
Project, The Match-Mismatch Conjecture and Learning to Use Data-Flow
Visual Programming Languages
-
GraVis
is an extensible two- or three-dimensional graph visualization and editing
tool with various algorithms for automatic generation of graph layout. It
supports various node styles, fill and line colors, resizable nodes,
user-definable edge and outline thickness, etc.
-
Calum Grant,
University of Cambridge Computer
Laboratory, has developed a generic visual program editor named
VPE,
a visual editor that can be customized to edit various visual formalisms.
He also developed
Vmax, a programmer's
text editor combined with powerful visualization of source code and run-time
behaviour.
-
GrammEd, a generic grammar
editor for graph-based visual languages, developed at the
Computer Science department of the
University of Geneva, in the
Visual Programming and Software Engineering group.
-
An East-West collaborative project with partial funding from NATO focused
on Empirical Studies
of Experts Using Visual Programming Languages.
-
The Kiev Institute of Cybernetics of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences developed
the
R-technology
back in the seventies. It includes R-graphs as a visual notation for various
programming languages.
-
The Diagram
Understanding System, developed by
R. P. Futrelle at the
Biological Knowledge Laboratory, Northeastern University, Boston, focuses
on the parsing of diagrams.
-
Leonardo is
an integrated C programming environment for reversible execution and logic-based
software visualization developed at the Computer and Systems Science Department
of the University of Rome La Sapienza.
-
Within the
Kannel
project, Antti-Pekka
Tuovinen is working on specifying Visual Kannel formally, and on developing
a Visual Language Definition and Implementation Framework for diagramming
languages like Visual Kannel
-
The Visual Computer Laboratory, Department
of Computer Science, University of
Pittsburgh is directed by Prof.
Shi-Kuo Chang. The activities
of the group are mostly focused on iconic languages.
-
The V visual
data-flow language: a data-flow visual programming language incorporating
iterative processing based on the notion of a conditional data-flow switch,
and on pattern matching for vectors, matrices, and multisets. See also a
technical report on it.
-
The Pictorial Computing
Laboratory, at the Computer Science
Department of the University of Rome. The group's primary theme of research
is the analysis and use of images in human-computer interaction, providing
an integrated view of a number disciplines like pattern recognition, image
processing, image interpretation, human-computer communication, visual languages
and interfaces.
-
VLCC: A Compiler-Compiler
for Visual Languages, a tool for the automatic generation of visual language
environments. The system includes a symbol editor and a production editor.
-
(broken link)The Laboratory
for Pen-based Computing and Visual Languages at the Computer Science
Department of Washington University in St. Louis.
-
The CODE Visual
Parallel Programming System, Department
of Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin. CODE is an
architecture-independent visual parallel programming system that generates
code for shared-memory and distributed memory architectures from the same
program.
-
Glide
is a high-level specification language for defining integrated graphical/textual
programming environments for visual programming languages.
-
The Pancode/Boxchart notations
(recently updated quite extensively - August 1997).
-
The Demonstrational Interfaces
Group, at Carnegie Mellon, is investigating ways to use Demonstrational
Interfaces to improve human-computer interaction.
-
The Amulet is a user interface
development environment for C++ and is portable across X11, Microsoft Windows
95 and NT, and the Macintosh.
-
Forms/3
is a declarative, form-based, visual programming language that follows the
spreadsheet paradigm. The
Forms/3
group is lead by Margaret
Burnett.
-
Clarity, a functional
visual programming language developed at the
Department of Information Science
of the University of Portsmouth.
-
The Requirements
Engineering Research group,
Department of Computer
Science, University of Zürich,
has a project on
Visual
and Textual Composition of Logic Programs.
-
ToonTalk is an interactive programming
environment for children, based on a virtual world and a set of animated
characters, among which programmable robots.
-
The Software Architect's
Assistant is a visual environment for the design and development of
Regis distributed
programs. It provides the user with automated, intelligent assistance throughout
the software design process. Facilities provided include the display of multiple
integrated graphical and textual views, a flexible mechanism for recording
design information and the automatic generation of program code and formatted
reports from design diagrams.
-
Kakuya Yamamoto, Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, has
produced
Visulan,
a 3D visual language based on bitmap elements and 3D graphical rewrite rules.
-
The Specification Languages
and Tools Research Group conducts some research on visual languages.
They have developed
REVEL, a visual
language for real-time systems. In this same group,
Alan Bigham is
working towards a PhD in Object-Oriented visual Languages.
-
The
Cube project: a 3D visual logic programming language developed by Marc
Najork and Simon Kaplan from CompSci at Uni of Illinois at Urbana.
-
IntelligentPad,
Hitachi Software Engineering Co. See also the
IntelligentPad Consortium page for Unix,
Mac and Windows downloadable implementations, the
information pages at the
Tanaka Laboratory, Hokkaido
University, and Fujitsu's
IntelligentPad home
page.
-
The Computer Vision Lab,
University of Pavia, Computer and Systems
Engineering Department has
some activities relating
to visual languages (the VIPERS and MARMOTTA projects).
-
Visual Language
Research At Tennessee, University of Tennessee, Knoxville: the
Whiteboard
Environment,
Spreadsheet
Programming (for GUI specification).
-
There used to be
Bounce, a real
time visual data-flow programming language, designed to create interactive
graphical simulations, and to filter and control midi, serial, ethernet,
and other devices. But Kaleida Labs was being absorbed by Apple and Kaleida's
server is currently unreachable.
-
Margaret Burnett's
research projects,
Oregon State University, Department of Computer Science.
-
The Programmers'
Playground, Washington University in St. Louis, CS department.
-
VIPR [Visual Imperative PRogramming language], a visual programming
language modeled on Pictorial Janus.
-
The
DiaGen
project, Computer Science department, University of Erlangen, Germany:
a generic tool for the generation of diagram editors.
-
The
NeuroGraph
project, Computer Science department, University of Erlangen, Germany:
an integrated environment for the development and simulation of artificial
neural networks, genetic algorithms and fuzzy logic.
-
The
MEANDER Project, a programming environment for parallel programming of
distributed memory machines, University of Siegen, Germany.
-
The Demeter Research
group, Northeastern University, Boston.
-
The SEIS (Software Engineering &
Information Systems) research group and their projects on
Visual Specification
Languages and
Specification of Coordinated
and Cooperative Activities (SOCCA), University of Leiden. They have also
developed
various tools
for the parsing and editing of Visual Expressions.
-
The Relational Grammar Home Page
(mirror at geocities,
mirror at cybercities) , maintained by
Kent Wittenburg
-
(PROgramming with Graph REwriting Systems).
FTP site,
alternate FTP site,
related
work.
-
Workgroup
on Graphical Programming and User Interfaces, U. of Leeds
-
The
Garnet
Project
-
University of Geneva, Visual Programming group
-
Software
Visualization and Animation System at University of Exeter
-
The "User
Interface Design Environment" project (UIDE), The Socio-Cognitive Technology
Research Group, University of Sussex.
-
The Self Project
-
The Map Programming Environment based on the Ideal Software Machine (Yale,
part of the Linda project).
-
The Software
Engineering group at La Trobe University, CS dep (in relation to the
Amdahl Australian Intelligent
Tools Program (AAITP), the Customisable Diagramming Editor, the Executable
Diagramming Systems, and Composite Diagram Symbols for the HyperTEXT System).
-
Graphics, Visualization, and Usability
Center, at Georgia Institute of Technology.
-
University of Exeter, Media Lab
(research in Software Visualization, Iconic Communication, Virtual Reality)
-
(broken link)
The Oikos Project,
Dept. of Computer Science, University of Pisa, Italy.
-
HeNCE (Heterogeneous
Network Computing Environment), based on
PVM.
-
Escalante, a generic tool to build visual editors and other "highly functional
visual language applications." The software is available at
ftp://ftp.cs.colorado.edu/pub/cs/distribs/escalante/
-
Agentsheets
(see also
Alex
Repenning's Home page)
-
Zeus, an
algorithm animation system.
-
Media
streams: an iconic visual language for video
annotation, by Marc Davis
, Brian
Williams, and Golan Levin.
Educational material
A-Flow is a visual
programming environment for the Windows platform, based on the control-flow
paradigm. A short tutorial is available on-line.
A-Flow is shareware.
Stagecast Creator (formerly called KidSim then
Cocoa) is an environment that allows one to integrate simulations in a web
site. It is based on a visual authoring tool to build and modify simulations
for display over the Web.
Logical Vision produces
WiT, a visual programming
environment geared at image processing and based on the data-flow paradigm,
in a way similar to Khoros and Cantata. It comes with very extensive operator
libraries, including all the common image manipulation primitives.
PeriProducer is visual
development environment for creating and testing interactive voice response
applications. It is based on a control-flow hierarchical directed-graph formalism
where each node contains an icon representing a specific basic function or
a more complex building block defined in another graph.
Visual
FlowCoder (formery called
Insecta Visual FlowCoderTM) is a Computer
Aided Development (CAD) System for text code. It includes parsers for many
classical programming languages (Ada, Fortran, Pascal, Java, Basic, C, C++,
...) and can generate a flowchart from source code and vice versa.
Create is a development
environment based on an object-oriented flowcharting formalism and capable
of generating source code in either C/C++ or Java.
Software through
Pictures is a development environment based on various object-oriented
methodologies. Its
"Structured
Environment" includes various integrated graphical editors (data-flow,
data structure, control-flow, state-transition, etc.).
Prograph
is an object-oriented, data-flow, visual programming language embedded in
a complete development environment (some aspects of the language remind me
of Prolog). To get an idea of what Prograph is, see
Pictorius Incorporated (the makers
of Prograph). See also:
LabVIEW, see also other
related resources:
VEE is a programming environment
based on a data-flow representation (with some control-flow add-ons). On-line
resources about VEE include:
inteRAD Technology Ltd. has
on-line information about
Build-IT,
a flowchart-based graphical programming environment for Windows platforms,
based on Java and CORBA, with an SQL interface, ODBC connectivity, and TCP/IP
and e-mail functions built-in.
Visual Solutions is the maker of VisSim,
a visual block diagram language for nonlinear dynamic simulation. They have
a demo version accessible via FTP.
Sanscript
is a development tool based on the data-flow paradigm, for Windows 3.1, Windows
95 and Windows NT (see
list of
features). Sanscript can script applications through cabinets of visual
components. It comes with a built-in cabinet of Math, List, File I/O, Directory,
Windows Registry operations. The base version is now free.
SimPhonics is
the maker of VPLus,
a development tool based on the data-flow paradigm, for Windows 95. VPlus
is oriented towards the development of real-time and signal processing
applications. A beta
test version is available.
Khoros, a
coarse-grain visual programming environment.
AVS/Express, the Application
Visualization System.
Visual Basic
Delphi
Visual C++
Visual Prolog
Visual dBASE
Visual Objects
GUI builders based on textual programming languages
Even though there is a debate as to whether Visual Basic, Visual C++,
and the like, should be considered visual programming languages, I am including
this small section about related resources. I am not competent in any of
these languages, so please, don't send me questions about them. I
do not endorse the information provided at these sites.
Visual Basic
Visual Basic Insiders Technical Summit,
VBITS:London 30 May-1 June 2000,
VBITS:Stockholm 22-24 May 2000.
The
Open Directory has an
entry
on Visual Basic
The
Code Archive holds the source code
of many Visual Basic programs that can be copied for free.
The
Visual Basic Web Directory
holds thousands of VB programming resources for free.
VB Code Bank
ATTAP - Visual Basic Programmer's
Site
Visual Basic FAQ
VB Online is a reseller of Visual
Basic add-on software and books. They have an
on-line catalog as well as
an on-line magazine
Active Server BBS is a Web-based
bulletin-board system to discuss various VB topics. Note: Its use requires
Internet Explorer or Netscape with the cookie mechanism enabled.
ComponentSource has many VB
and VC++ components, among which some are free.
The
web site of the Visual Developer
magazine has a code
archive where you can find all the source code, project files, and any
other electronic elements presented with the articles in their issues.
Delphi
Delphi is a visual language
based on Turbo Pascal. Other Delphi-related sites include
the
Open
Directory
Delphi32 (free Delphi components
available) with its
list of
Delphi-related sites,
Borland's
list of Delphi-related
sites,
The
Delphi Super
Page (lots of links to free components),
the
Atlanta delphi developers group,
the
Delphi bug
list
the
Coriolis group has an on-line magazine called
Visual Developer Online. It
has a lot of Delphi-related stuff.
Visual C++ Developers Journal (it is
now a much richer site that includes, among other things, a job bank)
Visual Prolog
Visual Prolog is a product somewhat similar
to Visual Basic, except that Prolog is the underlying programming language,
instead of Basic.
Visual dBASE
Visual dBase is now supported and
further developed by KSoft, Inc.
Visual Objects
Visual
Objects is a GUI-based development environment for MS Windows, apparently
for database-oriented applications
-
On-line technical reports and papers (usually in Postscript format):
compressed version -
uncompressed version
(more than 100 references with their URLs)
-
Cognitive aspects of programming - Online Technical
Reports and Papers (still at an embryonic stage)
-
Margaret Burnett's
Visual Programming Language
Bibliography , at Oregon State
University. Note: since 1998, this bibliography includes the full
text of all papers published in the proceedings of the IEEE
VL symposia.
-
On-line conference proceedings (usually in Postscript format):
The IEEE digital library has all the VL conference proceedings since 1997
(abstracts are accessible to everybody, full papers are restricted to members):
VL'99,
VL'98,
VL'97
VL'96 abstracts
-
Dr. Dobb's Journal,
August 1999
issue is on Visual Programming. It includes the following article:
Visual
Programming and Assistive Technology, by Dave Lafever, an article
by Allen Ambler on The Formulate Visual Programming Language, and
another article by Andri Ioannidou and Alexander Repenning on End-User
Programmable Simulations.
-
On-line book descriptions:
-
On-line papers relating
to Statecharts (I have made a (possibly outdated)
copy at CUI)
-
References on Visual Concurrent Languages, by Robert C Elliott
compressed version -
uncompressed version
-
Articles in journals or proceedings, or "off-line" technical reports (I haven't
really kept this one up to date): compressed
version - uncompressed version
-
Robert R. Korfhage's
list of references
on Visual Languages (last update: Jan. 29, 1997)
-
Paul Lyons'
list
of references with abstracts and comments
Note: although it is not necessarily used to implement visual programming
techniques, you might still be interested in having a look at the WWW Virtual
Library page that I maintain about Tcl and Tk.
My research group uses it to implement the user interface of our visual
programming tools.
If you would like to comment on or give us some suggestions about the information
we're providing, or if you are aware of on-line documents pertaining to visual
languages or visual programming that are not mentioned here, please tell
us by using our on-line comment form
.
Bertrand Ibrahim
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