Time: Tuesday, May 8 (half-day, morning, 8:30am to noon)
Location: Lacombe
Abstract:
Web Applications (WA) are developed and maintained under tight schedules. Much similarity across WAs creates opportunities for cutting development cost and easing evolution via reuse. This tutorial will show a practical way to exploit similarity patterns at architecture and code levels - to simplify the design of WAs, helping to meet the unique challenges of Web engineering. The approach is based on designing structures to represent similarity patterns in a generic way. Simplification of the WA design is then achieved by providing a mechanism to reuse such generic structures. We apply so-called mixed-strategy approach: Initial design is done using conventional methods (architectural/component design, ASP, JSP, PHP, J2EE or .NET). Then, we apply generative technique of XVCL to build generic structures to unify similarity patterns for which conventional techniques fail to provide effective generic solutions. By applying such mixed-strategy approach, on average, we reduce conceptual complexity (and maintenance effort) of a program solution by 60%, raising the levels of reuse by similar rates. We base the tutorial on industrial projects and on studies that explain in detail the technical underpinnings of the solutions.
Prerequisite Knowledge:
Basic understanding of software design and development. No prior knowledge of a specific Web technology is required.
Presenter: Stan Jarzabek (National University of Singapore)
Stan Jarzabek is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, School of Computing, National University of Singapore (NUS), and an adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo. He spent 12 years of his professional career in industry and 20 years in academia. Stan is interested in all aspects of software design, in particular techniques for design of adaptable, easy to change (high-variability) software. He has published over 90 papers in international journals and conference proceedings (his recent paper received the ACM Distinguished Paper Award and two other papers were selected as "best papers" at leading conferences). Stan has given tutorials on topics of reuse and re-engineering, most recently on cost-effective Web engineering at ICSE'06, ESEC-FSE'05 and at ICWE'05. Stan was a Principal Investigator in a multi-national collaborative project involving universities (NUS and the University of Waterloo), and companies in Singapore and Toronto.
