Issues encountered in building a flexible software development environment: lessons from the Arcadia project

This paper presents some of the more significant technical lessons that the Arcadia project has learned about developing effective software development environments. The principal components of the Arcadia-1 architecture are capabilities for process definition and execution, object management, user interface development and management, measurement and evaluation, language processing, and analysis and testing. In simultaneously and cooperatively developing solutions in these areas we learned several key lessons. Among them: the need to combine and apply heterogenous componentry, multiple techniques for developing components, the pervasive need for rich type models, the need for supporting dynamism (and at what granularity), the role and value of concurrency, and the role and various forms of event-based control integration mechanisms. These lessons are explored in the paper.