Welcome to Code Bubbles

Code Bubbles is now an open-source project. If you are interested in working on the code and having your changes be incorporated into the current binary, you should contact Steve Reiss .

"The Challenge of Helping the Programmer During Debugging" by Steven Reiss (VISSOFT 2014).

"Plugging in and into Code Bubbles: The Code Bubbles Architecture , by Steven Reiss, Jared Bott, and Joseph J. La Viola (SP&E 2013)

Documentation is still somewhat limited. There is information on installing the system. But the basic idea is just to download bubbles.jar and run it. The rest is done automatically. There is a tutorial available which shows some of the basic concepts. Help information is available within the system (see the Help button at the upper right when running Bubbles),

Introduction Code Bubbles is a front end to Eclipse designed to simplify programming by making it easy for the programmer to define and use working sets. Working sets here consist of the group of functions, documentation, notes, and other information that a programmer needs to accomplish a particular programming task such as adding a feature or fixing a bug. Code Bubbles accomplishes this by providing compact function-based views of the code (all backed by the underlying files) that are displayed in bubbles and that are easily moved around and manipulated on the screen. The bubbles are fully editable. A large bubble area lets the programmer set up different working sets simultaneously and easily move between them. In addition to providing facilities for editing and understanding code, the Code Bubbles front end provides facilities for debugging and testing programs. New features are always under development.

News An experimental installer for Code Bubbles is now available as a JNLP (Java Web Start) program.

Code Bubbles now features build-in automatic error correction while typing. This includes fixing spelling errors of various sorts, fixing syntax errors, automatic insertion of import statements, automatic insertion of catch statements, automatic insertion of return statements.

Code Bubbles includes context-sensitive help that features both tool-tip style help as well as demonstrations with or without sound. Just let the mouse sit over something on the screen and it will provide corresponding help text showing a demonstration of how to do it. The help text is available, but the links won't work unless Code Bubbles is running.

Code Bubbles is now available for Node.JS programs. Run with the -js option. There is also a version for Python (-python), but its not that mature.

Installation Code Bubbles can be obtained from http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/spr/bubbles/bubbles.jar. Simply download this jar file and double click on it to start its execution. Before you start, you should be familiar with Eclipse and have a relatively recent version of Eclipse for Java that is writable so you can add a plug-in to installed on your system. Instructions for installing and setting up the system are avaiable but might be out of date. Note that the newest versions of Code Bubbles require Java 7 and Eclipse 4.X. We will be moving to Java 8 in the summer of 2017.