A Hyperlinked Persistent Software Development Environment

Abstract

Traditionally, software development environments have been constructed on top of conventional operating systems using the file store as the only persistent storage facility. Such an approach forces the programmer to treat these persistent data structures in a fundamentally different way from other data structures. In a system with orthogonal persistence, any data structure may persist and thus outlive the execution of a program. Under such circumstances, it is no longer necessary for the programmer to treat long-term and short-term data structures in different ways. Thus, the introduction of orthogonal persistence removes many of the discontinuities inherent in most software systems. In this paper, we will present our initial ideas on the creation of an integrated environment for the development of persistent systems. Naturally, this development system will, by necessity, be resident within the total persistent environment. As such, a persistent object store provides the basis for the integrated programming environment. The result is an environment which differs significantly from those which have been developed as an adjunct to traditional programming practices in a file-based operating system. In this paper, we present our initial ideas on such an environment. In particular, we focus on potential uses for hyperlinking in the environment.