Philosophy

In this section we will inform you on most of the basic ideas behind Charta. Articles will describe specific design philosophies. You are encouraged to post messages if you have comments or questions.

Overview

Charta is a new software environment in development. The term software environment is deliberately chosen broad, because Charta will encompass many different aspects related to software. In the following sections the most important aspects of Charta will be covered:

User interfacing

A user interacts with software. Instead of leaving the development of a usable interface up to the programmer, Charta will try to relief the programmer of this burden as much as possible by providing the user with an automated user interface that is inherently uniform, consistent and adjustable. The user benefits from this.

Data storage

Software often uses or manipulates data that is stored somewhere. In Charta data will be stored as objects. These objects can transparently reside in many different object stores like in internal memory, on a hard disk or on a computer across a network.

Communication

Nowadays computers often interact through computer networks like the Internet. Charta will integrate important communication aspects like storing and retrieving data over computer networks.

Programming language

Software will have to be developed and Charta will allow creating software by providing a programming language. Moreover, Charta is also the environment that is used to run the created software.

Charta is all about integrating good software principles into one coherent environment so that each aspect of software can optimally interact with every other. Often Charta will be based on software principles that are well established in contemporary systems. For instance, Charta will not reinvent the principles underlying the development of a database, instead standard database theory will be used.

Also, sometimes Charta will apply principles used in one field of software to another field. For instance, instead of storing source code as flat text files, the source code will be stored in the object oriented storage facility that aims at generically storing all kinds of data in a uniform comfortable format.

Finally, occasionally Charta will use newly invented techniques to better satisfy the needs of the user. For instance, a totally new editor is being developed to allow the user to enter complex structured documents, like source code, in a structured fashion.