Technical Program Tuesday Morning

8:30 am -10:00 am
Convention Ctr – Ballroom
Welcome and Introduction
Conference Chair: Mary Beth Rosson, Virginia Tech
Program Chair: Doug Lea, SUNY Oswego

Convention Ctr – Ballroom
Keynote Address
Object Species Evolution
Dennis Tsichritzis, German National Research Center for Information Technology, and University of Geneva

Object concepts, prototypes, and products have evolved over the years, from their origins in passive stupid objects to today's increasingly active and intelligent agents. Considering the analogies to biological species evolution, we find that we still have a long way to go – in terms of complexity, mobility, security, and independence – to match nature.

Dennis Tsichritzis is Chairman of the Board of GMD, the German National Research Center for Information Technology, with institutes based in St. Augustin near Bonn, Darmstadt, and Berlin. He received his degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Universities of Athens (diploma, 1965) and Princeton (Ph.D., 1968). From 1968 to 1985 he was Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He was also a Professor at the University of Crete and Director of the Institute of Computer Science. Since 1985 he has been Professor of Informatics at the University of Geneva.

Tsichritzis pioneered many of the foundations of object-oriented enterprise systems. Over the past thirty years, his work has spanned database management, computational complexity, operating systems, office automation, object-oriented systems, and multimedia. Perhaps his most influential contributions came in a series of papers and anthologies written by Tsichritzis and his group at Geneva during the late 1980s and early 1990s, work that set the stage for much that has happened since in object-oriented systems. The Geneva group explored scripting, concurrency, databases, distribution, multimedia, development environments, and visual languages at a time when most researchers and practitioners were just beginning to understand the basics of object-oriented programming. More recently in his position as GMD Chairman, Tsichritzis has focused on coordinating technical innovation with public policy.

10:30 am -12:00 pm
Convention Ctr – Ballroom
Session A
Panel: Cracking the Software Paradox
John Daniels, Syntropy Limited (Co-moderator)
Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Wirfs-Brock Associates (Co-moderator)
Jim Amsden, IBM
Larry Constantine, Constantine & Lockwood
David DeLano, AG Communication Systems
Martin Griss, Hewlett-Packard
Ivar Jacobson, Rational
Else-Marie Östling, Icon Medialab

Can we develop software faster, cheaper, while remaining in control of quality? The advent of the Web and the e-business phenomenon mandate that scaleable, highly reliable, user friendly software be developed in a very short time. In this new world, consumers won’t accept clunky, clueless, brittle software. We've got to get it right the first time and then be able to rapidly change it to meet new market demands. This panel explores how development processes and tools need to be tuned, tamed, or reframed in order to crack this development paradox and deliver quality software in e-time.

Convention Ctr – 101, A, B, I, J
Session B
Papers: Concurrency
Chair: William Pugh, University of Maryland

As concurrency becomes an increasingly central aspect of OO programming, new research helps guide the semantics, support, and usage of concurrent OO language features. The first paper in this session presents a new model for describing the semantics of shared memory in concurrent programs. The model enables both safe usage and efficient implementation, especially on multiprocessors. The second paper describes a simple, useful design notation for mapping out the use of locks in concurrent programs. The third discusses the design options for supporting real-time concurrent OO programming, and their realization in an extension of C++.

Improving the Java Memory Model Using CRF
Jan-Willem Maessen, MIT Lab for Computer Science
Arvind, MIT Lab for Computer Science
Xiaowei Shen, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

Exclusion for Composite Objects
James Noble, Victoria University of Wellington
David Holmes, DSTC Pty Ltd.
John Potter, University of New South Wales, Sydney

Object-Oriented Real-Time Concurrency
Peter Buhr, University of Waterloo
Ashif Harji, University of Waterloo
Philipp Lim, University of Waterloo
Jiongxiong Chen, University of Waterloo

Convention Ctr – 101, C thru H
Session C
Practitioner Reports: Development Processes
Chair: Laura Hill, Sun Microsystems

Delivering high quality, working software is hard, especially delivering it on time and within budget. This session reports on the development process used by three projects. The first paper reports on using low-fi prototyping and a spiral lifecycle to successfully move from a vague vision statement to a commercial system. The second paper is about a commercial project with changing scope and two tough questions: how to bid and how to tell when the project is finished. The third report discusses principles of eXtreme Programming that worked well on a Web development project, and those that can be improved. Technologies used in these projects include JINI, RMI, servlets, and Smalltalk.

Remote Access to Clinical Data
Andy Schneider, BJSS Ltd.

    This project delivered a reliable, WAN based, distributed system. In common with most projects it had a vague vision statement and short timescales.We show how the application of lo-fi prototyping and a spiral lifecycle allowed us to deliver a commercial system on-time, even in these turbulent e-times.

Modeling Infection Scenarios: A Fixed-Price eXtreme Programming Success Story
Joseph Pelrine, Daedalos Consulting

    Is it possible to do fixed-price eXtreme Programming projects? How does one bid on a project with changing scope? When is the project finished? These questions and others will be addressed in the context of a successful project implemented in VisualAge Smalltalk which models infection and vaccination scenarios.

eXtreme Programming in Practice
James Newkirk, Object Mentor Inc.
Robert C. Martin, Object Mentor Inc.

    Follow along the implementation of a actual web-based application developed using XP. The application implements a user area for a commercial web site, using Java Servlets and JDBC. This report highlights the practices of XP that worked well on the project as well as those that could be improved.

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