Demonstrations

In most business software systems the time dimension of business objects plays a significant role. Time is a crosscutting concern that is hard to separate from other business logic. We have developed a toolkit that allows existing business application systems to be extended with "time-conscious" behavior in a non-intrusive way by factoring out all aspects of time-related behavior into a framework and a set of classes that is distinct from the existing code base. The Time Conscious Objects™ (TCO) toolkit is currently implemented in Java™, but through the use of generation technology the toolkit can easily be made available in any language that supports polymorphism.

The TCO toolkit has been explicitly designed to allow non-intrusive and incremental integration into existing systems. Time-conscious objects can have a major impact on the quality and maintainability of applications by eliminating the complexity of dealing with the time dimension. This is the case for example in time-based billing systems, in the insurance industry, and in the modeling of "parts" in ERP and manufacturing systems.

The demonstration provides an overview of the architecture and the APIs that TCO uses to integrate with existing application system environments. Beyond that, the demonstration shows on the basis of one or more small example applications, how TCO can be used to raise the level of abstraction in platform independent models and in business application code.

TCO product development is work-in-progress and the demonstration is intended to be highly interactive, giving the audience opportunity to raise and discuss their specific time-dimension-related requirements.