WG211/M14Sloane

The Monto Disintegrated Development Environment

Anthony Sloane, Matthew Roberts, Scott Buckley, Shaun Muscat

Macquarie University

Integrated development environments play a central role in the life of many software developers. Unfortunately, integrating new functionality into these environments is non-trivial and locks it into a particular framework. As a result, it is hard for language infrastructure researchers to make their work available to a wide spectrum of developers.

This talk will describe our Monto architecture which addresses this integration problem by disintegrating environments as much as possible. The components of a Monto-based development environment communicate via text messages across an off-the-shelf messaging layer. The architecture imposes limited constraints which enables easy combination of components to form an environment. A demo will be given of facilities built using our prototype Monto implementation.