Workbench - the guided tour

The Object Tools Workbench (also called OT Workbench) has one special feature: It is designed in a way which is allows it to be used with many different languages and compilers. The screen shots we used in this example were made with Visual Eiffel "in the background". So you may get different class names when you have a different compiler.

Incidentally, the workbench itself is written in Eiffel. We used Visual Eiffel. The GUI parts are based on GRAPE.


This guided tour will teach you the basic techniques necessary to control the OT Workbench. To do so we have to load  and compile a project.

ESD file Select the menu item Project and Open. The Select Project dialogue will pop up. Press the Browse button. Then the Select project description window will appear. Navigate up to the Fibonacc subdirectory. You will find it in <your Visual_eiffel folder> \examples \misc. Open the  project description.

You will see the following picture. Note that we use the names: Editing, Navigation and Viewer area in future for the main parts of our Workbench.

At first we must compile our freshly loaded project. This will also make sure that the installation has been really successful. Press the "Build" button. The project will be compiled and finally you should see the success report:

"Build" button

If there were any problems, you should check your installation.


Now lets start our real work.

Double-click on RECURSIVE_FIBONACCI_NUMBERS and then on FIBONACCI_NUMBERS. The result will be as shown below. You opened at first the cluster and then a class in this cluster. Now the features of this class are shown in the middle part of this window.
Now you can ask for more detailed information for all features - just double-click the name of the feature you are interested in.
Now navigate to the cluster KERNEL and open the class ANY. Then select the Anc./Desc. tab. You see now the inheritance relations of ANY - one ancestor and many descendents. If you have problems opening ANY, try collapsing all folders  (like RECURSIVE_FIB... and KERNEL) in the navigation area. Then double-click KERNEL and then ANY.
The next step: double-click on COMPARABLE - see the picture above. The picture changes immediately and shows the relations of COMPARABLE - makes it current. Now you know how to navigate - to browse.
We hope that everything is understandable and intuitive. Now you can play with the more advanced features of the workbench. You can also run your first Eiffel application with the help of the "Go" button or run the debugger. "Go" button

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Last updated: 2005/02/02 11:51:40