Frame-based editing is our work which combines blocks and text-based programming into a single method of editing. Our frame-based language, Stride, is available for use right now in the public releases of both Greenfoot and BlueJ.
Now, our large paper on frame-based editing has been published. You can freely download the individual paper, or the whole special issue with several other interesting-looking papers on block-based programming.
This paper is the canonical description of our frame-based editing work, describing its features and our design choices. I’m also quite pleased with section 13, which tries to explain why structured editing failed to take off, and yet block-based programming became a great success, despite being very similar concepts.
Thanks are due to John Maloney and Jens Moenig who have been very supportive of our work, as has the editor Franklyn Turbak, who did a very thorough job of editing the paper.
Academic Computing 