Dynamic Injection of Sketching Features into GEF Based Diagram Editors
page 822-831. (2013)Abstract
Software Engineering in general is a very creative
process, especially in the early stages of development like requirements
engineering or architectural design where sketching
techniques are used to manifest ideas and share thoughts. On
the one hand, a lot of diagram tools with sophisticated editing
features exist, aiming to support the engineers for this task.
On the other hand, research has shown that most formal tools
limit designer’s creativity by restricting input to valid data.
This raises the need for combining the flexibility of sketchbased
input with the power of formal tools. With an increasing
amount of available touch-enabled input devices, plenty of tools
supporting these and similar features were created but either they
require the developer to use a special diagram editor generation
framework or have very limited extension capabilities. In this
paper we propose Scribble: A generic, extensible framework
which brings sketching functionality to any new or existing GEF
based diagram editor in the Eclipse ecosystem. Sketch features
can be dynamically injected and used without writing a single
line of code. We designed Scribble to be open for new shape
recognition algorithms and to provide a great degree of user
control. We successfully tested Scribble in three diagram tools,
each having a different level of complexity.
