Integrating SHriMP with the IBM WebSphere Studio Workbench

This paper provides an experience report for researchers who are interested in integrating their tools with the new IBM WebSphere Studio Workbench. The Workbench (open source at www.eclipse.org) provides an open framework for building integrated development environments. We report on our experience integrating an information visualization tool (called SHriMP Views) with the IBM Workbench. Although SHriMP was originally developed for visualizing programs, it is content independent. We have re-targeted SHriMP for visualizing flow diagrams. Flow diagrams can be hierarchically composed, thus leveraging the key features of SHriMP that allow a user to easily navigate hierarchically composed information spaces. We discuss the di#erences between programs and flow diagrams both in terms of their semantics and in their visual representation. Terminals, which are a first-class entity that mediate between nodes and arcs in flow diagrams, presented the main challenges here. We also report on the main technical challenges we faced, due to the di#erent widgets sets used by SHriMP (Swing/awt) and the Workbench (swt)