The development of Phedias: a CASE shell

The paper describes the development of Phedias, a CASE shell, whose design objectives include ease of use and portability. Phedias supports method specification and CASE tools (in the form of graphical editors) generation. Within Phedias, a method is specified both conceptually and presentationally. The former is based on the metamodelling principle and by means of a graphical editor whose building blocks are the modelling constructs of a predefined metamodel. The latter is via a form based symbol definition interface which allows symbols to be defined, composed and viewed. Based on both types of specifications, Phedias is able to generate a CASE tool which supports and verifies the use of the method. A specified method together with its CASE tool, can in turn be used to specify other methods