Software (Re-)Engineering with PSF II: from architecture to implementation

This paper presents ongoing research on the application of PSF in the field of software engineering and reengineering. We build a new implementation for the simulator of the PSF Toolkit starting from the specification in PSF of the architecture of a simple simulator and extend it with features to obtain the architecture of a full simulator. We apply refining and constraining techniques on the specification of the architecture to obtain a specification low enough to build an implementation from

Lightweight incremental application upgrade

I present a lightweight approach to incremental application upgrade in the context of component-based software development. The approach can be used to efficiently implement an automated update feature in a platform and programming language agnostic way. A formal release model is presented which ensures consistency and allows the computation of incremental updates. Finally I show how this model can be implemented on top of Subversio

Coordination of a parallel proposition solver

In this paper we describe an experiment in which {sc Manifold is used to coordinate the interprocess communication in a parallelized proposition solver. {sc Manifold is very well suited for applications involving dynamic process creation and dynamically changing (ir)regular communication patterns among sets of independent concurrent cooperating processes. The idea in this case study is simple. The proposition solver consists of a fixed numbers of separate processing units which communicate with each other such that the output of one serves as the input for the other. Because one of the processing units performs a computation intensive job, we introduce a master/worker protocol to divide its computations. We show that this protocol implemented in {sc Manifold adds another hierarchic layer to the application but leaves the previous layers intact. This modularity of {sc Manifold offers the possibility to introduce concurrency step by step. We also verify the implementation of the proposition solver using a simple family of assertions and give some performance results

Language Parametric Module Management for IDEs

An integrated development environment (IDE) monitors all the changes that a user makes to source code modules and responds accordingly by flagging errors, by reparsing, by rechecking, or by recompiling modules and by adjusting visualizations or other information derived from a module. A module manager is the central component of the IDE that is responsible for this behavior. Although the overall functionality of a module manager in a given IDE is fixed, its actual behavior strongly depends on the programming languages it has to support. What is a module? How do modules depend on each other? What is the effect of a change to a module? We propose a concise design for a language parametric module manager: a module manager that is parameterized with the module behavior of a specific language. We describe the design of our module manager and discuss some of its properties. We also report on the application of the module manager in the construction of IDEs for the specification language ASF+SDF as well as for Java. Our overall goal is the rapid development (generation) of IDEs for programming languages and domain specific languages. The module manager presented here represents a next step in the creation of such generic language workbenches

Study of Tools Interoperability

Interoperability of tools usually refers to a combination of methods and techniques that address the problem of making a collection of tools to work together. In this study we survey different notions that are used in this context: interoperability, interaction and integration. We point out relation between these notions, and how it maps to the interoperability problem. We narrow the problem area to the tools development in academia. Tools developed in such environment have a small basis for development, documentation and maintenance. We scrutinise some of the problems and potential solutions related with tools interoperability in such environment. Moreover, we look at two tools developed in the Formal Methods and Tools group1, and analyse the use of different integration techniques