MDT - Magik Development Tools

MDT is getting more and more popular among the Smallworld™ community while the editor of choice for most Smallworld™ Magik programmers is still Emacs. MDT is a graphical integrated environment based on Eclipse. On the other hand, Emacs is a feature-rich text editor with lots of commands and macros. But which one is better, more productive and more comfortable? To answer this question we preformed specially prepared test.

The comparison was performed with using a MDT Professional Edition 1.0.0 and Emacs provided with Smallworld™ CST 4.1.1. Test cases were carried out by four Magik developers with different skill levels, trained in both Emacs and MDT.

Environment Tests

Development Benchmarks

The test consists of ten cases which reflect daily routines of developing Magik based software.

Legend: Emacs MDT
Test 1: File Reviewing Discovering given artifacts in a large Magik file: variables, definitions, methods declarations, etc.
Test 2: File Comparison Comparing and finding differences in two slightly different Magik files.
Test 3: Navigating among Files Opening and navigating among many files edited in the development environment.
Test 4: Traversing Source Code Jumping to method definitions of given methods contained in a Magik file.
Test 5: Code Writing Creating a new file and typing in a Magik class source.
Test 6: Misspelling Correction Finding, correcting syntax errors contained in a Magik file and formatting the source code.
Test 7: Building Products and Modules Creating folder structure and template files.
Test 8: Searching in Files Searching a group of files for a given text.
Test 9: Loading Products and Modules Loading sources of products and modules to a session.
Test 10: Creating Load List Creating load lists containing given Magic source files.
Summary The test results show that, in context of productivity and work ergonomics, work with MDT is more efficient than with Emacs. In comparison with Emacs using MDT reduced development time by 38%. Also the work ergonomics has been improved over 30% thanks to reduced mouse clicks and keystrokes. The results confirm that MDT significantly accelerates the software development process.