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Integrated Toolkit for Highly Advanced Computer Applications

Ziel

The aim of the ITHACA project is to develop an integrated application support system based on the object-oriented programming approach. The system envisaged will incorporate a wide range of features designed to:

- ensure reusability at various levels of application development and
- guarantee a high application quality.

In addition to the benefits to be gained from the object-oriented approach, the use of existing and emerging standards will play a decisive role in this context.
Object oriented systems constitute an ideal means of increasing software productivity and improving software quality. This technology offers the clarity and flexibility required to develop highly complex, large scale software systems. The integrated toolkit for highly advanced computer applications (ITHACA) environment will enable an extensive range of such systems to be produced quickly and reliably.

Flexible, configurable applications can be viewed as collections of reusable objects conforming to standard interfaces together with scripts that bind these objects together to perform certain tasks. Scripting encourages a component oriented approach to application development in which frameworks of reusable components (objects and scripts) are carefully engineered in an evolutionary software life cycle, with the ultimate goal of supporting application construction largely from these interchangeable, prefabricated components. The activity of constructing the running application is supported by a visual scripting tool that replaces the textual paradigm of programming with a visual paradigm of direct manipulation and editing of both application and user interface components. We have implemented a prototype, called Vista, which supports scripting of both the behaviour and the user interface of applications. Vista supports the visualization and graphical linking of components selected from an extensible component set. Scripts can be interactively executed, saved, and encapsulated as components for use in other scripts. Vista provides a single, hard-wired dataflow-based scripting model.
The underlying objective is to create a platform which will enable a wide range of applications to be developed quickly, reliably and at a low cost, an approach which is reflected to some degree in a number of existing developments, but which, as a result of its innovative nature of object technology and the leading-edge methods involved, has yet to gain a firm foothold in the marketplace.

The system will consist of the following components:

- object-oriented kernel
- object-oriented software information base
- applications development environment
- applications support environment

The system will comprise a persistent, object-oriented programming language, a fully integrated structurally object-oriented database system, as well as a runtime system geared to this. The system kernel is designed in such a way that it will be capable of integrating both object-oriented programming languages and procedural languages. A particularly innovative feature of the kernel is the concept of persistency. This enables objects to be stored permanently, a feature which other object-oriented languages have as yet failed to provide. In addition, application developers will be provided with an easy-to-use filtering and browsing system, a high level, interactive multi-language debugger, a configuration tool and a graphical user interface.

The object-oriented software information base will be used to store software information which constitutes the basic building blocks with which the developer works. It will cooperate closely with the tools of the application development environment. Particular consideration will be given to providing support for an object-oriented life-cycle and methodology geared towards streamlining the configuration process called for by the applications.

The information stored in the software information base will be organised in the form of generic application frames and will be selected interactively with the aid of a selection tool. During the early development phase, the programmer will also be supported by a requirement collection and specification tool which, together with detailed user specifications, will serve to specialise the generic frames to produce specific application frames. The software components selected will be customised by means of a combination of programming and scripting. A visual scripting tool will be used to graphically connect visual representations of objects and to interactively construct the applications.

The application support environment will provide application users with an advanced user interface, an activity coordination facility and a management system in order to offer assistance in modelling cooperative task solutions.

Two procedures will be employed to validate the environment. Firstly, a bootstrap technique will be used to develop the entire system in a single unique language, the aim of this being to prove that the environment is suitable for system programming. Secondly, several sample applications, which include a generic office model for use in a wide range of application scenarios, will be developed to illustrate the usefulness of the environment for application development.

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Koordinator

Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG
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Adresse
Fürstenallee 7
33102 Paderborn
Deutschland

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Letzte Aktualisierung: 17 Juni 1994

Mein Booklet

Permalink: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/2705/de

European Union, 2024