Open Comput. Sci. 2021; 11:90–98 Research Article Peter Sedlacek*, Marek Kvet, and Monika Václavková Development of FRIMAN – Supporting Tool for Object Oriented Programming Teaching https://doi.org/10.1515/comp-2020-0117 1 Introduction Received Mar 30, 2020; accepted May 04, 2020 Abstract: The main goal of this contribution is to present The very rapid development in the field of information the current developmental state of FRIMAN – the graph- technologies has become an important part of human lives. ical development environment designed to support the That is why many companies are seeking for young profes- teaching process of the object-oriented paradigm. FRIMAN sionals, who are able to adapt to new or various changing project has two main purposes: 1. simplifying the under- trends very quickly. One of the most affected subjects of standing of the basics of the object-oriented programming these increasing changes are also the universities, which for JAVA language beginners, 2. teaching students of ap- provide education of future professionals. plied informatics to collaborate in bigger project develop- Graduates of any technically oriented university must ment. Therefore, an application called FRIMAN has been get professional education in their particular study field. developed at the Faculty of Management Science and Infor- First, they need practical skills supported by excellent the- matics at the University of Žilina. This project is developed oretical knowledge. The skills facilitate entry into employ- by students of Master degrees under the leaderships of ex- ment while theoretical knowledge makes it easier to de- perienced software developers. The suggested system con- velop new unique solutions to problems that can arise in sists of several modules. In this paper, we focus on the de- practice. Students of information technologies and man- scription of selected modules and their current functional- agement science are not an exception. ity as well as description of future plans for this project and Faculty of Management Science and Informatics of brief description of FRIMAN development process. Atten- the University of Žilina has divided the education process tion is paid to a module for class management and a graph- into three study programs each with a focus on different ical code editor, which enables the creation of method bod- parts of information technologies. One of these study pro- ies using flow diagrams without the necessity of program- grams is management centered on information technolo- ming language syntax knowledge. Based on good evalu- gies. Continuous effort is made to help students of this ation by the development team preparing changes in the program to either develop or improve their understand- high school education process, the current application is ing and knowledge of modern information technologies. planned to be applied in practice. The result of this effort is an ability of future managers to use the modern information technologies as a competi- Keywords: Informatics teaching process, software tool, ob- tion tool for creating a positive and efficient organizational ject programming, class management, graphical editor change or bringing about new solutions based on informa- tion technologies. But despite the basic knowledge of vari- ous operating systems performance and common office ap- plications, our students should also learn the basics of ad- vanced information systems engineering [1]. Students of the management science at our faculty have to complete several subjects aimed at software devel- *Corresponding Author: Peter Sedlacek: University of Zilina, opment. Many of these students have either very weak or Faculty of Management Science and Informatics, Univerzitna 8215/1, even no experience with any kind of programming. There- 01026 Zilina, Slovakia; Email: [email protected] Marek Kvet: University of Zilina, Faculty of Management Science fore, it is very hard for them to understand the principles of and Informatics, Univerzitna 8215/1, 01026 Zilina, Slovakia; Email: different programming strategies like object-oriented pro- [email protected] gramming [2, 3]. Monika Václavková: University of Zilina, Faculty of Management Object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigm is one Science and Informatics, Univerzitna 8215/1, 01026 Zilina, Slovakia; of most commonly used paradigms these days and every Email: [email protected] Open Access. © 2021 P. Sedlacek et al., published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License Development of FRIMAN – Supporting Tool for Object Oriented Programming Teaching Ë 91 student in our faculty has to learn it regardless of the study 2 The basic characteristics of program. In OOP, any problem is solved via so-called "ob- jects", i.e. logical entities with their own data and func- FRIMAN tions and via communication between these objects. These functions, called methods are often used to modify the The first aspect needed to be taken into account is theex- data fields of the object which they are associated with. pected target group of users of the developed system and For many beginners in software engineering, even the ba- its requested primary functions. At the same time, it is suf- sic logic of a simple program based on OOP principles con- ficient to analyze existing software solutions in this area. stitutes a challenging task, because many applications are Currently, there are many environments, which offer designed by making them out of objects that interact with the possibility of simple software projects development. one another [3–5], which differs from the style of proce- The comparison of selected suitable solutions has led to dural programming [6], which some students are familiar the conclusion that the suggested system FRIMAN should with. find such ways of interaction, which would be easy tobe Another big issue may follow from the correct syn- understood by various groups of users, mainly beginners tax, i.e. when, where and why to write a semicolon or any in object-oriented programming. With this software tool other specific symbol. Such problems often occur when we want to provide the users with a simple and interactive changing current programming language for a different style of communication and control. one. Therefore, we have been searching for a suitable way An example of a suitable existing system could be the of making the education process of the programming ba- well-known environment BlueJ [10]. Currently, it is being sics easier mainly for the beginners. used in our teaching courses for the beginners. In contrast The FRIMAN project was created as an answer to the with professional environments like IntelliJ [11] or Net- fore-mentioned problems - i.e. a tool to simplify process Beans [12], BlueJ offers a simpler interface for classes and of learning OOP paradigm in Java language at our fac- their instances management via a graphical tool for object ulty. This project was originally introduced in [7] and re- inspecting. This feature enables the users to thoroughly ported in [8, 9] and it also serves another purpose. In or- understand the basic principles of the object-oriented pro- der to be an expert in Information Technology, it is not gramming. sufficient to have knowledge, it is also necessary tohave The main difference between the existing solutions experiences within this field. Therefore our master degree and the suggested developed tool consists in usage of students have to gain experience in the development of graphical components for creating the algorithms without bigger projects and in collaboration with other developers. the necessity of the knowledge of the specific program- For this reason, the FRIMAN project is designed and devel- ming language syntax. Instead of writing the code, various oped by students of master degree within our leadership graphical components should be used by the program de- [8]. velopers to create their application. The resulting code will The main research topic and the contribution of the pa- be generated from the diagram itself afterwards. The sug- per is to present the current development state of FRIMAN gested environment should check the correctness of the di- system and its particular components. agram and allow the users to debug their resulting algo- The remaining part of this paper is organized in the rithms. following way. The next section provides the readers with Based on the mentioned primary features and other the basic characteristics of the FRIMAN project and it de- supplementary system requirements, we have suggested scribes the architecture of the suggested system. The third the following architecture of the FRIMAN software tool. section is devoted to the explanation of the Class viewer The suggested system consists of five modules: module and the fourth section summarizes the features of – Editor, the Code editor module. The fifth and sixth sections de- – Debugger, scribe parts of this project that have arisen during the con- – Builder, tinuous development and the seventh, and penultimate – Class viewer, section briefly describes the work management and orga- – Core. nization in this project. Finally, the last section contains the obtained results and future development directions. The first module is the Editor. It was developed forcre- ation of individual methods and constructor bodies mak- ing use of common flowcharts, which can be made in an 92 Ë P. Sedlacek et al. interactive way. This module will be explained in detail in – Inspecting inner values of attributes in instances, the next section. – Calling methods and sending messages to particular Algorithms made in the Editor module are automat- instances and their ancestors, ically compiled to the JAVA language using the module – Passing the instances as parameters. Builder. The use-case diagram of required functionalities of The next module is a Class viewer. Its main task is to the Class Viewer module is depicted in Figure 1. provide creating classes and their management and also making instances of these classes. This module will be also described in a separate section.