Next generation software environments : principles, problems, and research directions

The past decade has seen a burgeoning of research and development in software environments. Conferences have been devoted to the topic of practical environments, journal papers produced, and commercial systems sold. Given all the activity, one might expect a great deal of consensus on issues, approaches, and techniques. This is not the case, however. Indeed, the term "environment" is still used in a variety of conflicting ways. Nevertheless substantial progress has been made and we are at least nearing consensus on many critical issues.The purpose of this paper is to characterize environments, describe several important principles that have emerged in the last decade or so, note current open problems, and describe some approaches to these problems, with particular emphasis on the activities of one large-scale research program, the Arcadia project. Consideration is also given to two related topics: empirical evaluation and technology transition. That is, how can environments and their constituents be evaluated, and how can new developments be moved effectively into the production sector

Juice: An SVG Rendering Peer for Java Swing

SVG—a W3C XML standard—is a relatively new language for describing low-level vector drawings. Due to its cross-platform capabilities and support for events, SVG may potentially be used in interactive GUIs/graphical front-ends. However, a complete and full-featured widget set for SVG does not exist at the time of this writing. I have researched and implemented a framework which retargets a complete and mature raster- based widget library—the JFC Swing GUI library—into a vector-based display substrate: SVG. My framework provides SVG with a full-featured widget set, as well as augmenting Swing’s platform coverage. Furthermore, by using bytecode instrumentation techniques, my Swing to SVG bridging framework is transparent to the developers— allowing them to implement their user interfaces in pure Swing

Enabling collaboration in virtual reality navigators

In this paper we characterize a feature superset for Collaborative Virtual Reality Environments (CVRE), and derive a component framework to transform stand-alone VR navigators into full-fledged multithreaded collaborative environments. The contributions of our approach rely on a cost-effective and extensible technique for loading software components into separate POSIX threads for rendering, user interaction and network communications, and adding a top layer for managing session collaboration. The framework recasts a VR navigator under a distributed peer-to-peer topology for scene and object sharing, using callback hooks for broadcasting remote events and multicamera perspective sharing with avatar interaction. We validate the framework by applying it to our own ALICE VR Navigator. Experimental results show that our approach has good performance in the collaborative inspection of complex models.Postprint (published version

A Programming Environment Evaluation Methodology for Object-Oriented Systems

The object-oriented design strategy as both a problem decomposition and system development paradigm has made impressive inroads into the various areas of the computing sciences. Substantial development productivity improvements have been demonstrated in areas ranging from artificial intelligence to user interface design. However, there has been very little progress in the formal characterization of these productivity improvements and in the identification of the underlying cognitive mechanisms. The development and validation of models and metrics of this sort require large amounts of systematically-gathered structural and productivity data. There has, however, been a notable lack of systematically-gathered information on these development environments. A large part of this problem is attributable to the lack of a systematic programming environment evaluation methodology that is appropriate to the evaluation of object-oriented systems

Some Notes on the Past and Future of Lisp-Stat

Lisp-Stat was originally developed as a framework for experimenting with dynamic graphics in statistics. To support this use, it evolved into a platform for more general statistical computing. The choice of the Lisp language as the basis of the system was in part coincidence and in part a very deliberate decision. This paper describes the background behind the choice of Lisp, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of this choice. The paper then discusses some lessons that can be drawn from experience with Lisp-Stat and with the R language to guide future development of Lisp-Stat, R, and similar systems.

The Stick-e Note Architecture: Extending the Interface Beyond the User

This paper proposes a redefinition of the human-computer interface, extending its boundaries to encompass interaction with the user's physical environment. This extension to the interface enables computers to become aware of their context of use and intelligently adapt their activities and interface to suit their current circumstances. Context-awareness promises to greatly enhance user interfaces, but the complexity of capturing, representing and processing contextual data, presents a major obstacle to its further development. The Stick-e Note Architecture is proposed as a solution to this problem, offering a universal means of providing context-awareness through an easily understood metaphor based on the Post-It note

Obvious: a meta-toolkit to encapsulate information visualization toolkits. One toolkit to bind them all

This article describes “Obvious”: a meta-toolkit that abstracts and encapsulates information visualization toolkits implemented in the Java language. It intends to unify their use and postpone the choice of which concrete toolkit(s) to use later-on in the development of visual analytics applications. We also report on the lessons we have learned when wrapping popular toolkits with Obvious, namely Prefuse, the InfoVis Toolkit, partly Improvise, JUNG and other data management libraries. We show several examples on the uses of Obvious, how the different toolkits can be combined, for instance sharing their data models. We also show how Weka and RapidMiner, two popular machine-learning toolkits, have been wrapped with Obvious and can be used directly with all the other wrapped toolkits. We expect Obvious to start a co-evolution process: Obvious is meant to evolve when more components of Information Visualization systems will become consensual. It is also designed to help information visualization systems adhere to the best practices to provide a higher level of interoperability and leverage the domain of visual analytics

GEANT4 : a simulation toolkit

Abstract Geant4 is a toolkit for simulating the passage of particles through matter. It includes a complete range of functionality including tracking, geometry, physics models and hits. The physics processes offered cover a comprehensive range, including electromagnetic, hadronic and optical processes, a large set of long-lived particles, materials and elements, over a wide energy range starting, in some cases, from 250 eV and extending in others to the TeV energy range. It has been designed and constructed to expose the physics models utilised, to handle complex geometries, and to enable its easy adaptation for optimal use in different sets of applications. The toolkit is the result of a worldwide collaboration of physicists and software engineers. It has been created exploiting software engineering and object-oriented technology and implemented in the C++ programming language. It has been used in applications in particle physics, nuclear physics, accelerator design, space engineering and medical physics. PACS: 07.05.Tp; 13; 2