Technical Reports Directory

The Distributed Systems Department at the Technical University of Vienna is active in teaching and research in the areas of software and networking for distributed systems and applications. Our research work ranges from the foundations and formal aspects of distributed systems to the practical aspects of building information systems based on todays technology. Our current work includes the development of engineering approaches to software development and the use of internet technology to build department-wide, university-wide, country-wide, and worl-wide distributed, hypermedia, multi-versioned information bases.

Our technical report series is intended to communicate our results rapidly and efficiently, before they appear in professional journals and conferences. We welcome feedback and comments.

Mehdi Jazayeri, Professor and Head

This directory holds all reports that are currently available from the department. You can read abstracts here or retrieve reports. All reports are PostScript. Use and for in-document expansion / de-expansion of abstracts. Click on a title for a separate abstract page. For retrieval click on a report number.

Component Programming - a fresh look at software components (TUV-1841-95-01)

Mehdi Jazayeri (jazayeri@infosys.tuwien.ac.at)

All engineering disciplines rely on standard components to design and build artifacts. The key technical challenge in software engineering is to enable the adoption of such a model to the development of software. The transformation from line-by-line development to component-based development will address many of the industry's productivity and quality problems. Indeed, component-based software development has been a long- standing dream of the software industry, prompting a search for both technical and nontechnical solutions. A successful approach to component- based development requires a comprehensive solution that draws on advances in programming languages, programming paradigms, algorithm analysis, and software design. The technical problem can only be addressed by such an integrated solution. This paper presents an approach based on the C++ Standard Template Library. More than a traditional library, STL embodies a concrete approach to software design based on a well-defined taxonomy and theory of software components. I present the fundamental contributions of STL to a paradigm of component programming-a component-based software development paradigm in which there is a clear separation between component development and application development. I motivate component programming, give the requirements for components and catalogs, and give an example of component programming applied to the standard Keyword in Context (KWIC) problem. I then summarize the implications of component programming for the software industry and for software engineering education.

Keywords: Software components, genericity, component programming

Process-Centered Software Engineering Environments: A Grand Tour (TUV-1841-95-02)

Pankaj Garg (garg@hpl.hp.com) , Mehdi Jazayeri (jazayeri@infosys.tuwien.ac.at)

Object-oriented concepts in Smalltalk, C++, Objective-C, Eiffel and Modula-3 (TUV-1841-95-03)

Harald Gall (H.Gall@infosys.tuwien.ac.at) , Manfred Hauswirth (M.Hauswirth@infosys.tuwien.ac.at) , René Klösch (R.Kloesch@infosys.tuwien.ac.at)