Showing papers on "Rapid application development published in 2006"

Augmented reality authoring: generic context from programmer to designer

Abstract: Developing an Augmented Reality (AR) application is usually a long and non-intuitive task Few methodologies address this problem and tools implementing these are limited or non-existent To date there is no efficient and easy development tool tailored to the needs of Mixed Reality (MR) We are presenting an initial taxonomy of MR applications, addressing the different levels of abstraction for defining the relation between real and virtual world We then demonstrate some development approaches and describe tools and libraries that we implemented in order to illustrate aspects of our authoring taxonomy Finally, we provide a definition addressing the requirements for new generation of AR rapid application development (RAD) tools based on actual implementations

A haptic toolkit for the development of immersive and web-enabled games

Abstract: The creation of applications of Virtual Reality enabled with Haptic interaction and dynamic simulation requires usually to cover many implementation details that increase the development time and the effectiveness of the application itself. This work presents one game application that has been developed using a Haptic toolkit for the rapid application development, that integrates 3D graphics,haptic feedback and dynamic simulation.The resulting application can be easily deployed on the Web directly to the final user.

Assessment of mobile experience engine, the development toolkit for context aware mobile applications

Abstract: Non-technical designers are using pervasive, context aware and mobile technologies as new design media to deliver unique user experiences and new values. Designer, artists and technologists often collaborate to design and develop these new media applications. In such multi-disciplinary collaborations, lack of suitable development tools and software engineering methods often pose non-trivial challenges. The requirements for a development toolkit for such contexts are enumerated. The rational behind usage of Mobile Experience Engine, a suitable CASE tool, is presented along with its high level architecture. This paper also examines how this tool supports various software engineering tasks during context aware mobile application development.

Rapid development of a distributed shop floor control system from an XML model-based control software specification

Abstract: As the level of distribution in a shop floor grows, the development of a distributed Shop Floor Control System (SFCS) is of significant interest. Since hand-woven control software is expensive and difficult to reconfigure, a formal methodology that supports generating control software rapidly is in need of exploitation. Although a number of approaches on such purposes have been presented, they lack some of following characteristics: (1) ease of modelling a nature of a distributed SFCS, (2) rapid modelling capability, (3) integrity between specification and development methodologies, and (4) automatic software development capability. The objective of the paper is to propose a rapid development methodology that fulfils given characteristics through a formal model-based control software specification. Specifically, formal models, a resource model and an Monitoring-Decision making-Execution (M-D-E) model are proposed to specify Unit of Control Devices (UCDs) and their control processes performed in a distribu...

Patterns and Tools for Performance Testing

Abstract: The growth of software applications in size and complexity is being followed by a number of specific nonfunctional requirements such as portability, interoperability, and availability on various platforms. Most often, these have been addressed by middleware or programming environment. In addition, easy customizability, adaptability, and sharing of components facilitates the development cycle. These should be understood and applied in a broader sense, i.e. to byproducts created during the development process such as programs for functional and performance testing. Much time is spent on developing test programs but their quality and quality of thus obtained results varies largely if the process is not standardized and automated. In this paper we present our experience with performance testing of a large scale suite of gateways that are used for the seamless integration of heterogeneous communication networks. We analyze the commercial and public domain tools for load generation and motivate our decision to define an in-house framework and build a distributed tool for performance. testing that is also not restricted by licensing issues and is readily available to everyone involved. Our tool is built on Visper, the object-oriented distributed programming middleware. The suitability and adaptability of the Visper model for rapid application development and the quality of produced result have proven our decision correct.

User centred rapid application development

Abstract: This paper describes our experiences modifying the Rapid Application Development methodology for rapid system development to design a data gathering system for mobile fieldworkers using handheld computers in harsh environmental conditions. In our development process, we integrated User-Centred Design as an explicit stage in the Rapid Application Development (RAD) software engineering methodology. We describe our design process in detail and present a case study of its use in the development of a working system. Finally, we use the design of the working system to highlight some of the lessons learned, and provide guidelines for the design of software systems for mobile data collection. In pursuing this project, we worked with field ecologists monitoring the evolution of coastal wetlands in the San Francisco Bay Area. The overall goal of the ecology project was to provide accurate information on the impact development has on these wetland areas. While the architecture of our system is tuned to the specific needs of the ecologists with whom we worked, the design process and the lessons we learned during design are of interest to other software engineers designing for similar work practices.

Design Rationale for Increasing Profitability of Interactive Systems Development

Abstract: User-centred development (Norman & Draper, 1986; Vredenburg, Isensee, & Righi, 2001) processes advocate the use of participatory design activities, end-user evaluations, and brainstorming in the early phases of development. Such approaches work in opposition of some software-engineering techniques that promote iterative development processes such as in agile processes (Beck, 1999) in order to produce software as quickly and as cheaply as possible. One way of justifying the profitability of development processes promoted in the field of humancomputer interaction (HCI) is to not only take into account development costs, but also to take into account costs of use, that is, costs related to employment, training, and usage errors. Gain, in terms of performance (for instance, by providing default values in the various fields of a computer form) or in reducing the impact of errors (by providing undo facilities, for instance), can only be evaluated if the actual use of the system is integrated in the computation of the development costs. These considerations are represented in Figure 1. The upper bar of Figure 1 shows that development costs (grey part and black part) are higher than the development costs of RAD (rapid application development), represented in the lower bar (grey part). The black part of the upper bar shows the additional costs directly attributed to user-centred design. Usercentred development processes compensate additional costs by offering additional payoffs when the system is actually deployed and used. The precise evaluation of costs and payoffs for usability engineering can be found in Mayhew and Bias (1994). Design-rationale approaches (Buckingham Shum, 1996) face the same problems of profitability as user-centred development processes. As payoffs are not immediately identifiable, developers and designers of software products are still reluctant to either try it or use it in a systematic way. Design rationale follows three main goals.

Expression and loop libraries for high-performance code synthesis

Abstract: To simultaneously provide rapid application development and high performance, developers of scientific and multimedia applications often mix languages, using scripting languages to glue together high-performance components written in compiled languages While this can be a useful development strategy, it distances application developers from the optimization process while adding complexity to the development tool chain Recently, we introduced the Synthetic Programming Environment (SPE) for Python, a library for generating and executing machine instructions at run-time The SPE is an effective platform for optimizing serial and parallel applications without relying on intermediate languages In this paper, we use the SPE to develop two code generation libraries, one for scalar and vector (SIMD) expression evaluation and another for parallel and high-performance loop generation Using these libraries, we implement two high performance kernels and demonstrate how to achieve high levels of performance by providing the appropriate abstractions to users Our results show that scripting languages can be used to generate high-performance code and suggest that providing optimizations as user-level libraries is an effective strategy for managing the complexity of high-performance applications

HW-SW design flow of a nano-satellite using UML and CodeSimulink co-design environment

Abstract: This paper presents a case study for high-level approach to mixed-systems co-design (analog, digital and software), which is based on UML as a high level system specification and description language. Aim of this paper is to demonstrate how UML specification can be easily translated into ANSI-C and VHDL using CodeSimulink co-design environment. This design flow is very suited to be a RAD (rapid application development) in a great variety of systems, especially low-cost ones.

Modeling of social systems with ingenias

Abstract: There are good toolkits for agent based simulation (ABS). However, for many potential users of ABS, such as sociologists or economists, it is still very difficult to specify models with such tools. This is mainly because this task requires writing code in some, usually object-oriented, programming language. There are some attempts to facilitate the specification with graphical tools and a set of predefined behaviours. For instance, Sesam (www.simsesam.de/) provides a graphical interface to specify agent behaviours as a kind of state machines, and there are also some rapid application development environments, for instance using the Python language in RePast Py (repast.sourceforge.net/repastpy/). But these are only applicable to simple models. Another issue is that the agent models initially supported by the different toolkits are rather simple, mostly reactive agents, whose behaviour is specified programmatically.

A structured approach to rapid simulation model development.

Abstract: This thesis presents a new methodology to accelerate the simulation model development process. Three research strategies were adopted during the research namely; case study, questionnaire survey and literature survey. Investigations done during the research revealed that among the stages within a simulation project life cycle the model development phase is the longest. Results of the case study research and literature review revealed that two major reasons for the lengthiness are the lack of understanding of the system to be simulated between the modeller and the user, and difficulty in programming. Many researchers have tried to accelerate the process mainly by improving the programming efficiency. However it is important to develop a model which represents the actual system to be simulated. Existing approaches to accelerating the simulation model development process do not guarantee that the model developed in a shorter time is the model which represents the actual physical system. Therefore there is a need for a new methodology to develop a model at a shorter time while ensuring that it represents the actual system.A simulation model is a piece of software. Therefore, the new methodology was developed by adopting Rapid Application Development approach of software development which emphasises the active user involvement. There are three components of the proposed methodology; Joint Application Development (JAD) team, a CASE tool to develop the simulation software independent conceptual model of the system, and a translator programme to convert the developed conceptual model into the computer simulation model. The proposed mythology accelerates the model development process not only by improving the effectiveness of the process, i.e. development of the model required by the user once but also the efficiency of the process, i.e. development of the model at a shorter time by automating the model development process.

Communication Model to Support Rapid Application Development.

Abstract: Communication systems, along with database systems, have attracted a lot of attention in software engineering research. Encouraged by the success of SQL systems, some early efforts have been devoted to the study of a similar system for communication systems. Even though there has been some research to provide a common language or a virtual machine for building communication systems, there are only few theoretical studies on the complexity of specifying and modeling communication systems. In this paper, we propose an approach to model common communication systems which have no complicated stochastic control logics. Our model contains two parts: (1) a communication logic definition and (2) a set of communication system operations. Our approach has the following benefits: a unified interface between communication roles/systems, a recursive way to model communication systems, and the adoption of a multicastconference model. These benefits enable us to efficiently build scalable communication systems. Also, it enables us to provide a Graphic User Interface for users to build a customized communication system. We give a case study showing that our approach is effective and efficient in modeling common communication systems.