1. Development Tools in Component-Based Structural Computing Environments Uffe K. Wiil Aalborg Univ. Esbjerg

2. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 2 Overview Why development tools? Construct development environment UML Tool Development scenario Experiences with service development Related work and conclusions Open issues and future work

3. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 3 Why Development Tools? Ease the construction of new services – Specification – Development Lowering the entry barrier for developers – Specification of services at a high level of abstraction (UML and IDL) – Use of well-defined design patterns and templates to generate component service skeletons

4. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 4 Why Development Tools? A lesson learned with HOSS – Rapid development of services Same lesson learned with Construct – E.g., development of a metadata service, wrapper and integration with Emacs in two days Is this not how computer scientists work? – Specific -> General(generalization) – General -> Specific(specialization)

5. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 5 Construct Development Environment The 5 steps in service development – UML diagram(UML Tool) – IDL specification(Emacs) – Compilation(CSC inside Emacs) – Service semantics (Emacs) (method bodies) – Compilation(Javac inside Emacs)

6. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 6 Construct Development Environment

7. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 7 UML Tool

8. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 8 UML Tool

9. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 9 UML Tool

10. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 10 Development Scenario Jakob is a graduate student taking a structural computing class – we have plans for one! Hands-on experience is a requirement Decides to build a simple navigational structure service as his class assignment – Based on anchors and links only! Decides to base development on existing development tools – in this case Construct

11. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 11 Development Scenario Create package

12. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 12 Development Scenario Define anchor class (1)

13. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 13 Development Scenario Define anchor class (2)

14. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 14 Development Scenario Define anchor class (3)

15. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 15 Development Scenario Create an association

16. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 16 Development Scenario Resulting UML diagram

17. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 17 Development Scenario Generated IDL specification

18. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 18 Development Scenario Documentation (1)

19. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 19 Development Scenario Documentation (2)

20. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 20 Experiences with Service Development Navigational service – Wrappers for Netscape, Emacs, UML Tool Metadata service – Wrappers for Netscape, Emacs Storage service Taxonomic, spatial, data mining, and cooperation services

21. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 21 Related Work Rational Rose (http://www.rational.com/rose) – Construct is public domain – Construct is based on an open systems philosophy with re-use and integration of existing tools, services and applications ArgoUML (http://argouml.tigris.org) – Also public domain – Worth an investigation!

22. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 22 ArgoUML

23. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 23 Conclusions We have demonstrated that development tools can lower the entry barrier for developers! – Services can be specified at a high level of abstraction in UML or IDL – Component skeletons are ”auto-generated” We propose to the OHSWG that UML is adopted as one of the primary ways to specify service interface – together with IDL

24. Uffe K. Wiil Open Hypermedia Systems 7 24 Open Issues and Future Work The development environment – Smoother integration of tools (control integration) – Keep developing our own tools? – Use exsiting tools such as ArgoUML? What is the appropriate component model? – Construct as it is? – Java Beans / RMI? – CORBA?