Design And Implementation Of Web-based Learning Support Platform For Compiler Principles

With the development of computer science and the popularity of network, learning and teaching based on Web has already been used more and more widely. Compiler Principles as a required course for computer science, tends to make learners feel more uninteresting and difficult to understand.due to the reason that it is more theoretical and abstract than other courses. What is worse, the traditional learning model makes the students lose their confidence and interest to learn this course. To compensate for the disadvantages, we design and develop a Web-based learning support platform for Compiler Principles.The research focus on three levels. The first one is to develop a software to make the abstract and esoteric concepts and algorithms visible. The second level is to provide a programming environment VLabP to help the learners to be clear about how the algorithms are used. The third one is to provide the interfaces for students to implement the algorithms on their own, which cultivate the their hands-on capabilities.By analyzing and summarizing the characteristics of Compiler Principles and shortages of the traditional teaching model, we research deeply on the visualization of the dynamic compilation process by using the technologies of SWING and AWT. Due to the complex syntax trees used in the system, we do some research on tidy drawings of m-trees, which can provide theory guiding for drawing syntax tree and Decision Tree. Using component technology and Serialization the system provide the function that users can define their own State Transition Diagram and works in the lexical analyzer. By dynamic compilation and loading we provided the second-developed interface by which users can submit the algorithm designed themself and the system load it dynamically. We also do some research on digital signature, and resolve the problem that Applet is not allowed to access to local resources, such as file manipulation. Finally, the paper sums up our work on design and implementation, and discuses how to improve our platform in the future.The tests and applications of our software shows that our system is stable, and can do great favor to help students to learn Compiler Principles. Especially, VLabP can greatly improve the practical ability and the problem-analysis ability, also it serves as a good application to the knowledge users have learned. There are59figures,5tables, and46references in this paper.