Rapid Object-Oriented Software Development

University of Bern, Sept. 13th, 1996

Joint CHOOSE / SI-SE Forum

Overview

Software industry always pursued two conflicting objectives: quality of software and rapid delivery. Many oscillations in the history of software engineering show temporary precedence of one pole over the other. About 15 years ago, object-oriented programming came with the promise of significant progress on both fronts. Nowadays, object encapsulation is widely accepted as a factor for better software quality and security; but on the other hand, the ability of objects alone to speed up software development is sometimes questioned. By contrast, a number of related or complementary technologies have emerged which are especially targeted for time-critical development: scripting languages for rapid prototyping, specialized object or component frameworks to encapsulate basic application functionality, programming tools or environments to help building applications. The term "Rapid Application Development" (RAD) has been coined to cover the application of such technologies. RAD and object technology are clearly complementary techniques. For this reason we decided to organize a forum with tutorials and experience reports that give an overview of how object technology can be applied for RAD.

Program

9.00

Registration and Wake-up Coffee

 

9.30

Welcome
Dr. W. Bischofberger, UBILAB, Union Bank of Switzerland

 

9.45

Objects Saved Rapid Prototyping
John Connell, NASA
A popular new trend, "good enough software," statistically optimizes the trade-off between defects, schedule, and features in software development. With Object-Oriented Rapid Application Development, however, it is possible to work outside this triangle, developing only correct features in less than normal time. Iterative prototyping suffered in the past from lack of successfully repeatable approaches, lack of robust prototyping tools, and a tendency of prototypers to take shortcuts in specification. This talk shows that object-oriented analysis and design methods, combined with a plethora of modern, robust, object-oriented rapid prototyping tools have significantly diminished these risks and made rapid application development a sound approach.

 

10.45

Coffee Break

 

11.15

Rapid Software Development - Some General Remarks
Georg Heeg, Roland Wagener, Georg Heeg
Object-oriented Systems Software development means modeling of phenomena of a real or imaginary world on a computer system. The quality of the developed software is defined by formal criteria like stability, processing speed, resource usage and essentially by the adequacy of the resulting model. Rapid application development means to use means and processes which speed up the development process under the given quality criteria. Bottlenecks in legacy software development processes consist mainly of manual transformations of models into computer technology. This talk discusses several approaches to get rid of these bottlenecks such as modeling of notions and concepts in object-oriented programming, frameworks, design patterns, visual programming, and ready-made solutions.

 

12.00

WebObjects - A Visual Development Environment for Building Server-Based Web Applications
Peter Lipps, NeXT Software Deutschland GmbH
The WebObjects visual development environment allows developers to easily create and manage WebObjects applications running on the server. These multi-tier web applications leverage a corporation's existing computing infrastructure of databases, mainframes, and existing applications needing a web interface. The graphical environment speeds development time by enabling developers to lay out WebObjects and HTML on each application page, bind the WebObjects dynamic elements to script methods and variables, and fill in the server logic. Developers will have significantly less code to write and maintain by building reusable components. This talk discussed the architecture and potential fields application of this technology.

 

12.45

Lunch Break

 

14.15

RAD with Object-Oriented Scripting Languages
Michael Scharf, TakeFive GesmbH
Object-oriented scripting languages like Perl5, IncrTCL and Python scarify many of the features absolutely necessary to build big, modular, efficient, product quality software systems. Their syntax and semantics are tuned to be efficient for small systems. They provide general purpose data structures like strings, lists and dictionaries and come with libraries for a wide range of applications. They are frequently embedded into systems to make it possible to glue components together in a flexible way. This talk discusses the strengths and weakness of object-oriented scripting languages for rapid application development in the context of a number of practically developed applications.

 

14.45

A Breaking Network Management Complexity Apart
Luca Deri, IBM Zurich Research Laboratory and University of Bern
Up a couple of years ago network management was a challenging discipline. Applications were difficult to install, tailor and use. Additionally users who needed an application for a particular task had to spend a significant amount of time and code it using low-level tools. Recently, the advent of the WWW and Java allowed to rapidly create applications accessible from virtually every platform. Aim of this talk is to show how the platform developed by the author allow the fast development of simple yet powerful network management applications. The main idea is to break the complexity apart by building up the kernel of the application on high-level services that hide the complexity of the underlying protocols. Furthermore, the use of the WWW and Java allow graphical user interfaces to be created easily starting from basic components and services provided with the platform itself.

 

15.15

The Development of a Visual Environment for Portfolio Management
Dr. Xavier Pintado, University of Geneva and Vol-de-Nuit SA
Vol-de-Nuit SA is currently developing a visual environment for portfolio management. The system comprises a set of visual components such as time series and portfolio optimizers in a dynamically extendible framework. The framework relies entirely on Microsoft OLE technologies. The presentation addresses framework design issues and reports on the experience gained during the development process. It focuses on how to achieve easy integration on reusable software components. In particular, it discusses how C++ components can be easily assembled inside RAD environments such as Visual Basic or Borlands Delphi.

 

15.45

Coffee Break

 

16.15

General Assemblies of CHOOSE and SI-SE

 

16.45

Happy hour for general assemblers

Speaker Profiles

John Connel has delivered many popular public seminars on rapid prototyping in major cities world-wide for many years. He is currently managing object-oriented software engineering and rapid prototyping for many successful development projects concurrently at NASA Ames where he is Chief Software Engineer for Sterling Software. He is senior author of two Yourdon Press books, Structured Rapid Prototyping, 1989, and Object-Oriented Rapid Prototyping, 1995.

Luca Deri, formerly a research fellow at the University College of London and member of the OSIMIS development team, is currently a Ph.D. student in the Software Composition Group at the University of Berne working part-time at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory. He received his degree in Computer Science with a thesis on Network Management from Tecsiel S.p.A. where he worked as a consultant after the graduation. His professional interests include OSI management, object-oriented technology, Internet technology and human-computer interaction.

Georg Heeg studied Computer Science and Mathematics at University of Dortmund. He worked as research assistant in the programming language area at University of Dortmund. In 1987 he founded Georg Heeg - Object-oriented Systems, a software house focused on object technology. The goal of the company is to accompany object-oriented software projects in the industry to ensure success.

Peter Lipps is chief technical officer of NeXT Software Germany GmbH.

Xavier Pintado is a member of the Object Systems Group of the University of Geneva. He holds a Ph.D. in information systems from the University of Geneva. Dr. Pintado is responsible for the activities of ObjectLab, a research lab devoted to the development of object-oriented techniques for the financial domain. His research interests include component-oriented design, fuzzy logic and information theory. Dr. Pintado is also chief software architect at Vol-de-Nuit SA, a software development company active in the development of software components for asset management.

Michael Scharf has a diploma in Physics and worked for nine years at European Molecular Biology Laboratory Heidelberg in the BioComputing department as software engineer and system designer. He developed software systems and prototypes in the areas of management, visualization, analysis, browsing and retrieving of molecular biological data. He currently works as software engineer for TakeFive GesmbH.

Roland Wagener studied Computer Science at University of Dortmund. In 1990 he joined Georg Heeg. He built the support organization of Georg Heeg. Today he is director of training and consults and teaches Smalltalk and the usage of GemStone.

Registration Form

Participation Fees (please mark):
Early registration (until July 15th)
    [  ]  SI and CEPIS members   Fr. 150.-
    [  ]  nonmembers             Fr. 200.-
    [  ]  students               Fr.  20.-
Late registration (after July 15th)
    [  ]  SI and CEPIS members   Fr. 200.-
    [  ]  nonmembers             Fr. 250.-
    [  ]  students               Fr.  40.-
CHOOSE and SI-SE members get a further discount of Fr. 20.-.
 
 
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Please send this registration form to:
    Schweizer Informatiker Gesellschaft
    RAPID 96
    Schwandenholzstr. 286
    CH-8046 Zörich
    Tel. 01 / 371 73 42, Fax 01 / 371 23 00
    E-mail: si@ifi.unizh.ch