Pivi: An eclipse Plug-In for Visual Parallel Programming.
The Pivi aims at providing an easier and interactive way to create a visual model of a programming construct like if-else, while, parallel programming and other instructions. It is primarily intended for use by students. By theoretically studying the concepts, students may find it difficult to understand them and to implement them in a program. Another major issue is that a lot of time and effort is needed to program a problem using legacy textural programming languages, especially for students who are in a learning phase. Concepts of programming constructs like if-else, while, instructions, parallel programming, concurrent programming and multicore programming require understanding to implement them. This eclipse plug in Pivi addresses to solve all these problems.
Solving the above-mentioned problems is important as it is easy to visualize a solution to a problem. For beginners, it is simple and facilitates to create a visual model of a problem. Support for visual programming helps to reduce the time that students need to invest in programming a solution to a problem using textural programming languages and facilitates for a rapid development. Since the tool validates the linking of icons that represent programmable constructs and generates the code automatically, the chances of syntax errors in the code is highly reduced. Concepts like parallel programming can solve many complex problems. By understanding such concepts deeply, students can increase their problem-solving skills.
This Eclipse Plug-In is focused on facilitating teaching/learning techniques and implications of parallel, concurrent and multicore programming. The developed software is an Eclipse plugin that allows users to visually program in Java. The plugin presents a palette of icons like if-else, instructions, connections, while, parallelization that can be used to create a program visually. Each icon in the palette represents different constructs of a programming language. The plugin also presents a canvas on which user can place the necessary icons from the palette to create a program. The plugin should allow users to connect the icons present on the canvas by validating the connections. The user will be able to modify the parameters provided for each icon. Concurrent programming features are provided by the plugin. This includes creation of threads, execution of instructions in multiple threads, access to the memory among threads. The plugin also validates if the graph of icons and connections created on the canvas is a valid program. For a valid program created visually on graph, the plugin generates the code in Java programming language which can be understood by the user in an effective way.