Onward! Films

Onward! attracts novel ideas and research early in its life-cycle. Is DNA recombination your inspiration for a new programming language? Do you think that we need new paradigms for bringing programming to the masses in Second Life and on Wikipedia? You may find ideas like these presented as Onward! papers and films and discussed in Onward! open space. Onward! is willing to accept a modicum of speculation and lack of validation if the idea and the arguments behind a submission are compelling enough to suggest inspiring presentations and discussions that propel research and the industry towards new horizons. The full papers, short papers, and films of Onward! 2008 are show-case exemplars of such research.

DOLLI - Project Presentation

Abstract

The DOLLI Project was a student course we conducted with about 50 sophomores during the winter term 2007/2008. In this course all the students had to work together on one big problem which was posed by a real client, the Munich airport. The students also worked with real data from the Munich airport, which only was delayed by 30 minutes for security reasons. One specialty of the project was the transition from a unified process in the beginning of the project to an agile development style at the end, which included a two-week scrum phase where all the students and supervisors moved into an office building located at the Munich airport. The client acceptance test also took place at the customer's site in a real terminal, where the students presented their results on three check-in counters.

xDIVA: A Debugging Visualization System with Composable Visualization Metaphors

Abstract

Despite the progress that has been made in the field of program visualization, programmers nowadays still rely on inserting extra code (e.g., print statements) to visualize complicated program states during debugging. Only recently have tools such as DDD (Data Display Debugger) begun to provide visualization of data types for programmers. Still such visualization remains limited. There are many obstacles that have impeded and continue to impede program visualization for practical use. One such major obstacle one is the wide variety of data types in a computer program. Given the variety and complexity of computations for many domains, it is unlikely that visualizations will be available a priori to cover everything that might be interesting. As an attempt to address the problem, a debugging visualization tool called xDIVA is presented. The visual effects of xDIVA use 3-D shapes, colors, and animations from a 3-D rendering engine. xDIVA conducts a novel and meticulous object-oriented design so that visualization metaphors are interactive, composable, and decoupled from data, i.e. a complicated visualization metaphor can be composed and assembled from basic ones, each of which is independently replaceable. The benefits of xDIVA are demonstrated by several applications.