RobotStudio: A Modern IDE-based Approach to Reality Computing

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1 RobotStudio: A Modern IDE-based Approach to Reality Computing Li Xu Department of Computer Science University of Massachusetts Lowell Lowell, MA 01854, USA xu@cs.uml.edu ABSTRACT The recent report by the ACM Job Migration Task Force points to the immediate need to teach programming-in-thelarge, the skills to work with and develop large and complex production-grade software and systems, so young computing professionals can stay competitive in the face of IT globalization and offshoring of software [4, 13]. However, current computer science curricula are inadequate to prepare college graduates to meet the reality of computing. Most course projects fall into the programming-in-the-small mode, in which students implement small, isolated projects to explore the course subject matter and with little emphasis on how the smaller pieces can be integrated to build sophisticated larger scale systems. This paper presents a modern IDE-based approach to address this inadequacy. We develop RobotStudio an extensible framework for building IDEs targeting a simple yet versatile educational robot platform. Student projects are implemented as modules of RobotStudio and, when put together, they form a comprehensive IDE for programming the robotic environment. This paper describes the architecture of the RobotStudio framework, its extension mechanisms, and the teaching practice of using RobotStudio in an introductory compiler construction class to illustrate programming-in-the-large principles. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.2 [Computer and Information Science Education] General Terms IDE, Programming-in-the-large, Compilers, Robotics, Embedded Systems Keywords IDE, Compiler Construction, Eclipse, Educational Robotics Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. SIGCSE 07, March 7 10, 2007, Covington, Kentucky, USA. Copyright 2007 ACM /07/ $ INTRODUCTION The recent report by the ACM Job Migration Task Force points to the immediate need to teach programming-in-thelarge, the skills to work with and develop large and complex production-grade software applications and systems, so young computing professionals can stay competitive in the face of IT globalization and offshoring of software [4, 13]. However, current computer science curricula are inadequate to prepare college graduates to meet the reality of computing. Most students gain experience in building software by doing course programming projects. However, the majority of these course projects fall into the programming-in-thesmall mode: students implement small, isolated projects to explore the course subject matter with little emphasis on how the smaller pieces can be integrated to build more sophisticated and larger scale systems. Research studies have long established that programming-in-the-large (building large multi-module systems) is significantly different from programming-in-the-small (constructing individual modules) [6]. As a result, college graduates often lack the competitive skill set and experiences in dealing with large, sophisticated, industrial-strength software when they join the IT workforce [1]. To address this inadequacy and promote a balanced emphasis on programming-in-the-large principles, this paper presents a modern IDE-based approach for building computer science course projects. We develop RobotStudio, an extensible framework for building IDEs targeting a simple, yet versatile, educational robot platform. Student projects are implemented as modules of RobotStudio and, when put together, they form a comprehensive IDE for programming the robotic environment. This paper describes the architecture of the RobotStudio framework, its extension mechanisms for student IDE projects, and teaching practices for using RobotStudio in an introductory compiler construction class. This paper makes the following contributions: 1. We present a new IDE-based approach to teaching programming in the large, skills critical in real-world production software development. Student projects are designed as modules of the base IDE framework and will be integrated into the framework to form a comprehensive IDE. 2. We developed the RobotStudio framework for building student IDE projects. It leverages our previous work on the pedagogical robotic programming platform and builds upon the industrial-strength Eclipse RCP plat-

2 form. The framework provides simplified core services and extension mechanisms to reduce complexity in developing student IDEs and serves as an example of a modern IDE. 3. We present teaching practices for using RobotStudio to teach an introductory compiler construction class. Student IDE s are organized into incremental levels to ease the learning curve on building s. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the rationale of our IDE-based approach, introduces RobotStudio and compares with related work. Section 3 gives the background of the RobotStudio building blocks: Eclipse RCP platform, the Handy Cricket robot controller and the Chirp programming language. Section 4 describes the RobotStudio framework: its architecture, core services, and extension mechanism. Section 5 describes the use of RobotStudio in an introductory compiler construction class. We conclude in Section RATIONALE OF IDE APPROACH Integrated-development environments (IDEs) play a central role in production-quality software development. IDEs integrate the vast array of development tools into a single environment and provide sophisticated GUI interfaces to manage the multitude of tasks and resources in large-scale software development. Due to their importance and widespread use in the software industry, educators have tried to introduce the use of industrial-strength IDEs into classrooms. However, using off-the-shelf professional IDEs directly in teaching projects can cause significant problems. Due to time constraints and limited resources, students can easily be overwhelmed by the complexity of a modern IDE and just trying to understand and use it to do simple tasks may need a non-trivial effort. To reduce the learning curve, educators have built teaching IDEs and IDE-like environments. DrJava [2] and BlueJ [8] are dedicated teaching IDEs for Java programming. The Kenya [5] and Penumbra [12] projects implement Eclipse s on top of Eclipse IDE to teach introductory programming. We believe bringing modern industrial-strength IDEs into the college teaching context has significant benefits: students are exposed to the common practices and tools used in real-world software development and gain experience using production tools. The IDE software itself is also a great example of programming-in-the-large principles and students can see and experience for themselves how large software works. However, the IDE-based approach must be used carefully and not interfere or conflict with the primary goal of teaching the course subject matter. To realize the benefits of the IDE approach and also minimize the negative effects caused by the complexity and overhead of using IDEs, we developed the RobotStudio framework students not only learn and use IDEs, they build an entire IDE themselves by working on the course projects. 2.1 Design Goals RobotStudio framework is designed to achieve the following goals: 1. Serve as a modern IDE to program the Chirp and Cricket robot platform [15]. Using its default IDE, the built-in reference compiler and robot controller simulator, students can quickly learn the features of Chirp language and Cricket robot the target platform of their projects, thus minimizing the overhead of using the IDE. As shown in Figure 1, RobotStudio provides a simple and easy to use IDE interface that greatly reduces the complexity and overhead of using IDEs. The default IDE itself also serves as an implementation example to students when they build their own IDEs. 2. Provide an extensible framework to develop teaching projects as modules to the framework, so student projects can be integrated into RobotStudio and form a complete IDE. In their projects, students must obey the specification of RobotStudio extension points and be aware of integration issues when implementing their projects. 3. Serve as an easy to understand example of modern IDEs. This will enhance student understanding of programming-in-the-large principles embodied in the student IDE projects. Section 4 discusses the architecture of the framework that reflects the above design goals. 2.2 Comparison with Related Work Although RobotStudio uses Eclipse, an off-the-shelf professional IDE, it hides most of the irrelevant features of Eclipse from students (see Section 4 for core services exposed by the framework). This reduces the complexity for students and allows them to focus on solving the course subject-matter related domain problems. Compared to the pure teaching-ide approach, students get experience in using a production-quality IDE while RobotStudio helps ease the learning curve with a simplified interface. RobotStudio takes advantage of Eclipse Rich-Client Platform (RCP) technology and is implemented as a standalone application. It contains only student project related GUI components, while other Eclipse teaching s rely on the more general Eclipse GUI workbench and have to coexist with all other s installed with Eclipse. 3. BACKGROUND RobotStudio leverages our previous work on using the pedagogical Chirp and Cricket robot programming platform in undergraduate programming classes [15]. It builds on the Eclipse Rich-Client Platform (RCP) and provides a comprehensive IDE for the Chirp and Cricket educational robotic environment. 3.1 Eclipse Rich-Client Platform Eclipse is an industrial-strength open source Java application development platform [7, 3]. It provides a sophisticated Java IDE for Java development, which has been used in both commercial Java product development and as a teaching tool for Java programming. Eclipse is also a platform for IDE and rich-client application development. Users can use the Eclipse platform to develop s which can be integrated into the Eclipse base IDE. Educators have built teaching IDE s on top of the Eclipse platform [5, 12]. RobotStudio uses the latest Eclipse RCP technology [11] and is implemented as a standalone application rather than a of the base Eclipse IDE.

Figure 1: RobotStudio IDE. 3.2 Chirp and Cricket RobotStudio builds on our previous work using the Chirp and Cricket embedded educational robotic platform [15].

3 Figure 1: RobotStudio IDE. 3.2 Chirp and Cricket RobotStudio builds on our previous work using the Chirp and Cricket embedded educational robotic platform [15]. The Handy Cricket is an inexpensive, embedded controller that was developed for educational applications [9]. To program the Cricket robot controller, we have designed a simple, yet capable, new language called Chirp to build Cricketbased robotic programs to control robot sensors and motors [14]. The platform has been used to teach compiler construction basics in an undergraduate programming class. RobotStudio targets the Chirp and Cricket programming platform and provides a modern IDE to develop Chirp programs. The simple yet versatile structure and feature set of the Chirp and Cricket platform make it an ideal target to develop student projects on system topics, including compiler construction, assembly programming, computer organization, and embedded robotic systems. 4. ROBOTSTUDIO FRAMEWORK 4.1 Architecture The architecture of the RobotStudio framework is shown in Figure 2. The framework consists of the following components: Workbench: the RobotStudio GUI interface, which provides a source code editor, Project Explorer view for managing Chirp projects and files, and the Console view to print out text messages. Workspace resource management: managing the IDE workspace which consists of user projects and files. RobotStudio uses a simple two-level workspace model which consists of top level projects and second level project files. The projects and files are mapped to folders and files in the host file system. Chirp reference compiler: the built-in compiler used by the default RobotStudio IDE. The compiler consists of a scanner, parser, abstract-syntax tree (AST) intermediate representation (IR), and Cricket bytecode generator. Cricket simulator: a cycle-accurate Cricket controller simulator based on Virtual Cricket [10], which is used to test and debug Chirp programs. Cricket device binary code programmer: a serial portbased device programmer tool to program the Cricket hardware. The framework itself serves as a complete IDE for Chirp and Cricket program development. It also provides core services to student projects to build separate IDEs. Student s connect to the framework through predefined extension points and use the core services to form a complete IDE.

4 project GUI Workbench Resource Mgmt project... Extension Points Scanner Parser AST IR CodeGen Reference Compiler Virtual Cricket Simulator RobotStudio Framework project Cricket Device Progmmer Figure 2: RobotStudio Framework Architecture 4.2 Core Services The framework provides GUI control and resource management services to the extension s. The workbench GUI interfaces respond to user interaction targeting user s. The event handler triggers the framework controller to dispatch the message to appropriate registered objects, passing along the handle of any project and file resources. The user can also request services directly from the framework core. The framework controller is a Singleton object and aggregates published services through the Facade design pattern. For example, a user can request the Console service by calling the robotstudio.robot StudioApp.log method to print out text messages in the Console view. 4.3 Plugin Extensions Users can build modules and connect to the Robot- Studio extension points. The framework defines and publishes extension points for user s to connect to. The user must conform to the extension point schema specification and implement the required extension Java interface. The extension points are published in the Robot- Studio XML file and their XML schema files, which specify unique ID, name, run-time Java class and description information for the extension point implementation. For example, Figure 3 shows the XML definition of the RobotStudio.scanner extension point and a sample extension. 4.4 IDE Integration and Deployment RobotStudio is distributed as a self-contained binary application. To integrate user s to build an IDE, once the project is developed, the deployment process is simply to package the as a ZIP file and to unpack it into the default directory in the RobotStudio application folder. In addition, RobotStudio provides an Eclipse update site for remote online deployment. <extension-point id="scanner" name="robotstudio Scanner" schema= "scanner.exsd" /> <extension id="scannerextension" name="scanner Extension" point="robotstudio.scanner"> <scanner class="myide.myscanner" id="myide.myscanner" name="my Scanner"/> </extension> Figure 3: Scanner Extension-Point and Example extension 5. USING ROBOTSTUDIO IN A COMPILER COURSE We have been using RobotStudio in an introductory compiler construction class. In this class, students develop their own Chirp scanner, parser, and code generator in three modules and integrate them into RobotStudio to form a fully-fledged IDE for the Chirp and Cricket platform. 5.1 Student Projects as IDE Plugins Each student project centers around the course subject matter: to build scanner, parser and abstract-syntax tree (AST) representation, and then generate binary code using the AST. To support these projects, the base framework defines three extension points to link with the student scanner, parser, and code generator s. In addition, the workbench GUI is customized with perspectives configurations to show relevant views for each project. Special menu items and tool bar buttons are added to invoke the modules implemented by the students. To ease the learning curve on building s, we use three difficulty levels to guide students through the projects. Level 1 is the scanner, in which students only need to implement the scanner class for the RobotStudio.scanner extension as shown in Figure 3. There is no GUI interaction with the workbench and the generated token stream is printed through the Console view service. Using the Level 1, students learn the basics of building and integrating s. Execution of the Level 1 is shown in the left screen shot of Figure 4. The Level 2 parser adds a GUI tree viewer to the workbench as shown in the right screen shot of Figure 4. Students need to build the parser and generate an AST tree suitable for use with the RobotStudio tree viewer: the tree viewer uses the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern, and to display the AST tree, student must adapt the AST tree and implement an ITreeContentProvider interface for the GUI viewer to display tree elements. This project demonstrates the use of design patterns and integration through published extension points and interfaces, which are key techniques in the programming-in-the-large methodology. Finally, the Level 3 code generator closes the circle and builds a fully-fledged Chirp IDE as shown in Figure RobotStudio as an IDE Artifact As students gain more experience in using and developing with RobotStudio, the source code of the framework is given to students to study as a sample IDE artifact to il-

Figure 4: RobotStudio extension Level 1: Scanner and Level 2: Parser lustrate programming-in-the-large principles and to help them understand modern IDE systems. 5.

The class consists of both senior undergraduate, full-time graduate, and part-time professional Master program students. Initial feedback from the students has been highly positive.

5 Figure 4: RobotStudio extension Level 1: Scanner and Level 2: Parser lustrate programming-in-the-large principles and to help them understand modern IDE systems. 5.3 Preliminary Student Feedback We have been using RobotStudio in the compiler construction class at UMass Lowell. The class consists of both senior undergraduate, full-time graduate, and part-time professional Master program students. Initial feedback from the students has been highly positive. In general, students identify with the approach and are enthusiastic about the whole IDE project. Several students with internships and work experience have commented that the techniques in this course will be immediately useful for their future tasks. 6. CONCLUSIONS This paper has presented a modern IDE-based approach to teaching programming in the large, skills that are critical for real-world production software development. Leveraging on the industrial-strength Eclipse RCP platform, we developed the RobotStudio framework, an extensible framework for building IDEs targeting the simple, yet versatile, Chirp and Cricket educational robot platform. Using Robot- Studio, student projects are implemented as modules and connect to the base framework; through integration, they realize a comprehensive IDE. We have been using RobotStudio in a compiler construction class with encouraging initial results. We are excited to share our experiences on RobotStudio with other educators. In addition to compiler classes, we expect the framework can be adapted to use with other courses. More information, including the Eclipse of the framework, can be accessed from URL: xu/robotstudio. 7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work has been supported by a UMass PDG grant. We would like to thank Mark Schlesinger for his help and support of the RobotStudio project. We are grateful to Jesse Heines for his very constructive comments on the presentation of this paper. 8. REFERENCES [1] UMass Lowell Computer Science Dept. post-graduate survey and personal feedback from recent Computer Science graduates. [2] E. Allen, R. Cartwright, and B. Stoler. Drjava: a lightweight pedagogic environment for java. In SIGCSE 02: Proceedings of the 33rd SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, pages , [3] J. Arthorne and C. Laffra. Official eclipse 3.0 FAQs. Addison-Wesley, [4] W. Asprayn, F. Mayadas, and M. Y. Vardi. Globalization and Offshoring of Software: A Report of the ACM Job Migration Task Force. [5] R. Chatley and T. Timbul. KenyaEclipse: learning to program in Eclipse. In ESEC/FSE-13: Proceedings of the 10th European software engineering conference, pages , [6] F. DeRemer and H. Kron. Programming-in-the large versus programming-in-the-small. In Proceedings of the international conference on Reliable software, pages , [7] E. Gamma and K. Beck. Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-Ins. Addison-Wesley, [8] M. Kolling and J. Rosenberg. Objects first with Java and BlueJ. In SIGCSE 00: Proceedings of the thirty-first SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, page 429, [9] F. Martin, B. Mikhak, and B. Silverman. MetaCricket: A designer s kit for making computational devices. IBM Systems Journal, 39(3 & 4), [10] F. G. Martin, N. Palmer, and B. Skinner. The virtual cricket: A web-based simulator for learning robot programming. In preparation. [11] J. McAffer and J.-M. Lemieux. Eclipse Rich Client Platform : Designing, Coding, and Packaging Java Applications. Addison-Wesley, [12] F. Mueller and A. L. Hosking. Penumbra: an Eclipse for introductory programming. In eclipse 03: Proceedings of the 2003 OOPSLA workshop on eclipse technology exchange, pages 65 68, [13] D. A. Patterson. President s letter: Offshoring: finally facts vs. folklore. Communications of the ACM, pages 41 42, Feb [14] L. Xu and F. Martin. The chirp language specification. Technical Report TR , Dept. of Computer Science, UMass Lowell. [15] L. Xu and F. G. Martin. Chirp on crickets: teaching compilers using an embedded robot controller. In SIGCSE 06: Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education, pages 82 86, 2006.

Eclipse Support for Using Eli and Teaching Programming Languages

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