We (that is: Neil, Amjad and I) have worked on Stride and its frame-based editor for about four years now, and there is a lot of work in it.

First, Stride was designed and released as part of Greenfoot, and we wrote a few smaller papers about specific aspects of use cases around Stride. Then, more recently, we also incorporated Stride into BlueJ, making the new frame-based editor available to a much larger audience.

In parallel, we have worked on a comprehensive paper, describing the design ideas and rationale behind many of the detailed aspects. It also describes related work and background (which you might like to read in its own right if you are interested in the history of block-based systems or structure editing), and a few small user studies.

I’m glad it is out now; you can read it here:

Kölling, Brown & Altadmri: Frame-Based Editing

It has been published in a special edition of the Journal of Visual Languages and Sentient Systems (focussed on blocks programming). The rest of the special issue is very much worth reading as well – you can find it here.

I would like to thank all our reviewers who contributed many useful comments and suggestions, especially Jens Mönig and John Maloney, and the special editions editor Franklyn Turbak.