The IDE is dead; Long live the IDE

A while ago, I stumbled upon the ASP.NET Uservoice page for gathering feature requests and suggestions. Among the most popular requests was something odd, a feature named Code Bubbles. This did not sound like anything to do with web programming, but its great popularity sparked my interest. Fortunately, the suggestion featured a link to a website explaining the concept, including a demonstration video… and minds were blown!

These guys have completely reimagined the IDE, laying down the shackles of technology that have held back current efforts. Sounds dramatic? That's because it is. Abstractions have been added to allow more freeform ways to organize code without being limited by the notion of files and the project structure as we know it. The central theme of the work is to have all the code you need on your screen, and nothing else, working down to the method level – the groupings of code that give the concept its name. A host of features have been developed for making the workflow of navigating to related code effortless. But alas, words prove too poor a medium as I try to explain this wonder. Go, spend the next 8 minutes of your life watching the demonstration video of a working Java IDE exploring the Code Bubble idea. Here are their own words, describing the concept, but do follow the link to see the video and read more:

“Developers spend significant time reading and navigating code fragments spread across multiple locations. The file-based nature of contemporary IDEs makes it prohibitively difficult to create and maintain a simultaneous view of such fragments. We propose a novel user interface metaphor for code understanding and maintanence based on collections of lightweight, editable fragments called bubbles, which form concurrently visible working sets.

The essential goal of this project is to make it easier for developers to see many fragments of code (or other information) at once without having to navigate back and forth. Each of these fragments is shown in a bubble.

A bubble is a fully editable and interactive view of a fragment such as a method or collection of member variables. Bubbles, in contrast to windows, have minimal border decoration, avoid clipping their contents by using automatic code reflow and elision, and do not overlap but instead push each other out of the way. Bubbles exist in a large, pannable 2-D virtual space where a cluster of bubbles comprises a concurrently visible working set. Bubbles support a lightweight grouping mechanism, and further support connections between them.

A quantitative user study indicates that Code Bubbles increased performance significantly for two controlled code understanding tasks. A qualitative user study with 23 professional developers indicates substantial interest and enthusiasm for the approach, despite the radical departure from what developers are used to.”

I'm absolutely in love with the idea that you have a sort of working space with all the methods and structures you are working on, allowing you to shift between them as you work on different tasks. Some urgent bug just came up? No problem, just move to a new work space and begin stepping through the affected code, building up the new working space.

Working on large projects, I'm sometimes tempted to bundle too much functionality into a single class, just to have all the related code at hand. As a project grows, the number of files that are relevant to some piece of functionality can grow very high, especially when you have to include all the layers of the application. What Code Bubbles does that looks so promising, is to put all the related code in a single screen or at least scrollable area. The calling hierarchy is clearly defined and it becomes easy to follow the thread of execution as it goes from class to class and module to module.

After finding this, I've begun noticing activity regarding the project across the web. One such this is the very interesting Debugging Canvas project from Microsoft Research. It is actually the result of a collaboration between Microsoft and the people behind Code Bubbles in an effort to bring the new ideas to Visual Studio. It's a limited part of the whole Code Bubbles concept but I'm thrilled to see it taken seriously by Microsoft. After all, until it lives in Visual Studio, it's largely irrelevant to me in practice. There is also a video for the Debugging Canvas on their site, so take a look at that as well. You can go install it now as an extension to Visual Studio, that is, if you have the Ultimate version of Studio.

I, for one, welcome our new Code Bubble overlords.