A Case Study

At Georg Heeg, we have implemented a WYSIWYG editor for TeX that includes a (almost) complete implementation of TeX. Since this was a collaborative project that required close interaction between my co-developer Roman Hille and me, we decided to use a newly-developed hypertext editor (ObjectHelp) to keep information about ongoing progress and relationship between the original WEB source and our Smalltalk source code.

Since ObjectHelp has versatile Smalltalk execution facilities, we could build links into the Smalltalk code quite easily (clicking on a link would open a HierarchyBrowser showing the method). The hypertext document was structured according to the section numbering of TeX: The Program which we used as the reference text. At that time, we decided that reading the book would be rather more pleasing than reading the WEB source .

Linking back was not implemented at the time, instead, we had comments in each method that listed the section(s) which were implemented by that method. We also had an ObjectHelp utility that would sweep through the source and link all methods into their appropriate documentation pages.

The main highlights of the process were:

1. Shared hypertext was persistent yet always up-to-date.
2. A structure for the original program was defined by TeX: The Program
3. We used a Source code management system (ApplicationManagement) that enabled us to quickly get each other's changed source code.

Overall, I think that using this approach made the project manageable, although we still did not have the perfect tools.