Building a timeline editor from prefab parts: the architecture of an object-oriented application

Abstract

This article describes InterVal, a software tool that allows authors to create dynamic timelines. It is one tool in Intermedia, a framework developed at Brown University's institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) that allows professors and students to create linked multimedia documents and encourages exploration, connectivity, and visualization of ideas. The system was written using an object-oriented extension to C, MacApp, and a set of underlying building blocks, or functional groups of objects. This paper describes InterVal and discusses the architecture of the InterVal application, focusing on the design of the object-oriented architecture and on the use of appropriate building blocks. Concluding sections evaluate object-oriented programming and outline future work .