Albert Schappert

Automated support for software development with frameworks

This document presents some of the results of an industrial research project on automation of software development. The projects objective is to improve productivity and quality of software development. We see software development based on frameworks and libraries of prefabricated components as a step in this direction. An adequate development style consists of two complementary activities: the creation of frameworks and new components for functionality not available and the composition and configuration of existing components. Just providing adequate frameworks and components does not necessarily yield automation and efficiency of software development. We developed the concept of relations between software components as a foundation for abstraction, reuse and automatic code generation for component interrelationship. Furthermore we suggest to supplement frameworks with an active cookbook consisting of active recipes which guide the software developer in the use of framework elements. In this paper our concept of using relations among software components is presented and the active cookbook is illustrated as a means for developer guidance. We created a prototype to demonstrate these concepts.

Mobile Information Agents on the Web

Information acquisition from the distributed and rich resources of the World Wide Web is confronted with the following situation: there are only a few entry points for finding the right information, there is too much net traffic for information acquisition, and there is no coordination between different users.

Content Analysis and Visualization of Epidemiological Documents on the Internet

Due to the dramatic growth of available data in science, engineering and economics, it has become increasingly difficult to access relevant information and to recognize hidden structures within large data sets. Current approaches for data mining and information visualization are often lacking the necessary efficiency for practical application.

Framework-centered software development: report on the workshop

The workshop found broad interest in the 00 community and significant contributions were submitted. There were two groups of submissions: one for framework design and the other for framework adaptation. There were oral presentations of 2 papers selected from each category, followed by groupdiscussions in the afternoon. The rest of this report includes abstracts of the presentations (including links the sources), and the findings from the discussion sessions. We conclude the report with a list of topics where more research will be fruitful.