SE News

The SAE Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) supports model-based embedded systems engineering. With its associated tools, AADL gives you the power to specify, analyze, and generate embedded real-time systems. An SAE standard, AADL has been developed by and for the avionics, aerospace, automotve, and robotics communities.

AADL provides:

• textual and graphic notation with precise semantics for embedded and real-time systems
• an industry standard modeling notation for applications and execution platforms
• XML interchange of AADL models between subcontractors, integrators, and agencies
• UML profile that presents AADL as a specialized modeling notation within UML framework
• open source tool solution — the SEI Open Source AADL Tool Environment (OSATE)
• commercial tool support

http://www.aadl.info/

DENIM is a system that helps web site designers in the early stages of design. DENIM supports sketching input, allows design at different refinement levels, and unifies the levels through zooming. The DENIM Project, led by Prof. James Landay, is focused on researching tools for designing user interfaces through informal interaction such as sketching.

http://dub.washington.edu/denim/

OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.

OpenID starts with the concept that anyone can identify themselves on the Internet the same way websites do-with a URI (also called a URL or web address). Since URIs are at the very core of Web architecture, they provide a solid foundation for user-centric identity.

The first piece of the OpenID framework is authentication — how you prove ownership of a URI. Today, websites require usernames and passwords to login, which means that many people use the same password everywhere. With OpenID Authentication, your username is your URI, and your password (or other credentials) stays safely stored on your OpenID Provider (which you can run yourself, or use a third-party identity provider).

Today, OpenID has emerged as the de-facto user-centric identity framework allowing millions of people to interact online. With programs such as the “I Want My OpenID Bounty”, developers of Open Source projects are rapidly adding support for OpenID in order to enable their communities.

http://openid.net/

In recent years much attention has been paid to the field of digital architecture as, among others, described by Rijsenbrij (2004; 2005). A central component in digital architecture is the use of principles that can be described as guiding statements, which affect the use of IT in organizations. However, until today, hardly any research has been conducted in trying to identify the concepts that are/can be addressed in such principles. This, in turn, makes it a complicated task for the digital architect to determine what is/can be addressed in the principles formulated. In this thesis, I present the findings of a research trying to identify these concepts, which was conducted over a period of almost nine months, based on thirteen semi-structured interviews and IT-related literature. The findings are presented based on Rijsenbrij’s four worlds concepts, and cover three of the four worlds: the B-, I-, and A-world.

Sean Natoewal

http://www.via-nova-architectura.org/content/view/5/13/lang,en/

There is no better way to start an argument among a group of developers than proclaiming Operating System A to be “more secure” than Operating System B. I know this from first-hand experience, as previous papers I have published on this topic have led to reams of heated e-mails directed at me - including some that were, quite literally, physically threatening. Despite the heat (not light!) generated from attempting to investigate the relative security of different software projects, investigate we must.

Richard Ford

http://www.acmqueue.com/…

Software development projects require a lot of “paperwork” in the form of requirements documents, design documents, test plans, schedules, checklists, release notes, etc. It seems that everyone creates the documents from a blank page, from the documents used on their last project, or from one of a handful of high-priced proprietary software engineering template libraries. For those of us who start from a blank page, it can be a lot of work and it is easy to forget important parts. That is not a very reliable basis for professional engineering projects.

ReadySET is an open source project to produce and maintain a library of reusable software engineering document templates. These templates provide a ready starting point for the documents used in software development projects. Using good templates can help developers work more quickly, but they also help to prompt discussion and avoid oversights.

Jason Robbins

http://readyset.tigris.org/

How To Be A Good Product Manager is a blog that provides regular tips on good product management practices. While it focuses more on managing technical and online products, most of the concepts are appropriate for broader product management purposes.

Jeff Lash

http://www.goodproductmanager.com/

Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

Apollo enables developers to create applications that combine the benefits of web applications – network and user connectivity, rich media content, ease of development, and broad reach – with the strengths of desktop applications – application interactions, local resource access, personal settings, powerful functionality, and rich interactive experiences.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/

Now that CIBIT has become a part of Det Norske Veritas, the course portfolio of CIBIT will be available for international delivery as well. On the DNV Academy website you will find the complete overview of all programs ranging from IT Architecture Masterclasses to Data Warehousing and Software Quality trainings. All programs are available for in-house delivery and a growing number of courses will be offered as public course in Paris, London and Hamburg as well.

http://www.dnv.com/itgs/academy

Het is een open deur dat IT-projecten vaak uitlopen. Te duur, te laat en niet de gewenste functionaliteit. Maar wat zijn de factoren om de slagingskans van IT-projecten te vergroten?

In dit thema veel over de valkuilen en manieren om die te vermijden. Het positieve nieuws is dat projectmanagement volwassen lijkt te worden en verder professionaliseert.

http://informatie.nl/artikelen/2007/03/

Say a user agent wants to load a web document and display it, format it, process it, or whatever. It might be an XML document, containing XHTML, SVG, MathML, or a nutritious mix of these vocabularies. Or it might be an HTML document, ideally valid HTML4, but more likely an unappetizing bowl of tag soup. The problem is, how does the user agent know whether to parse the document as XML or HTML?

This article introduces a set of heuristic rules for sniffing the content of a file in order to determine whether it is an XML document or an HTML document. An implementation is provided using the xmlReader interface of libxml2. This implementation is used in Prince, a formatter for creating PDF files from web documents.

Michael Day

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2007/02/28/what-does-xml-smell-like.html

In August 2004, the International Process Research Consortium (IPRC) began development of a process research roadmap for the next ten years. The resulting frameworks topics represent an intersection of the strategic goals of the IPRC and the priorities of the IPRC members. The framework provides an answer to the IPRCs focal question:

How should the community represented by the IPRC membership invest in process research over the next 10 years?

To answer this question, the IPRC members developed a shared understanding of drivers that influence both the evolution of and unexpected change in software and systems and the organizations that acquire or produce software and systems. Together the members have considered drivers of a societal, technological, political, environmental, economic, and business nature and used their experience and imagination to envision plausible scenarios for the next decade.

http://www.sei.cmu.edu/iprc/roadmap.html

“All right, I want to start a software product line. What do I do first?”

There are many resources available to you, many of which are available on or through our web site. You can read case studies and experience reports of organizations pursuing software product lines, get to know the SEI’s Framework for Software Product Line Practice, or sign up for a course on software product lines.

This FAQ addresses the most important questions when starting a software product line.

Paul Clements

http://www.sei.cmu.edu/news-at-sei/columns/software-product-lines/software-product-lines.htm

Ivan presents a new type-safe way to write COUNTOF so that it produces a compile-time error if you accidentally pass it to anything other than the built-in array. The traditional way to find the number of elements in an array in C++ has been to calculate it using the sizeof operator. Sometimes the sizeof expression is wrapped in a macro to make it more readable. In this article, I present a new type-safe way to write COUNTOF so that it produces a compile-time error if you accidentally pass it a pointer, std::vector, or anything else other than the built-in array.

Ivan J. Johnson

http://www.ddj.com/…

Sun’s Java Developer Network interviewed Brian Goetz, author of Java Concurrency in Practice, and currently a Sun technology evangelist. The interview, Writing Better Code: A Conversation With Sun Microsystems Technology Evangelist Brian Goetz, focused on Java performance, one of Goetz’s specialties.

In the interview, Goetz gave this advice on how to write faster-performing Java code:

“Often, the way to write fast code in Java applications is to write dumb code—code that is straightforward, clean, and follows the most obvious object-oriented principles. […] If I could wave a magic wand and send out one message about Java programming, it would be this: Trust the JVM. It’s smarter than you think. Stop trying to outwit or outsmart it. Tell it what you want, and it will do its damnedest to make your application run as fast as it can.”

Brian Goetz

http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/goetz_qa.html