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EiffelWorld Electronic Newsletter -- Vol. 29, No. 1 - May 2005
In this Issue of EiffelWorld:
1. Eiffel News
- Availability of EiffelStudio on Solaris 10, X 86 and Sparc as well as Solaris/Sparc
64 bits
- EiffelEnvision 2.5, Free Edition, now available
- Eiffel Training Session this summer
2. In the Press
- Another exclusive EiffelWorld column by Dr. Bertrand Meyer
- Upcoming talks by Dr. Meyer in Pekin and Shanghai
- Laser 2005 (Registration deadline rapidly approaching!)
3. Eiffel Corner
- Eiffel libraries freely available
- Focus on Graph Library
- User Group meetings
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EIFFEL NEWS
* Availability of EiffelStudio on Solaris 10, X 86 and Sparc as well as Solaris/Sparc
64 bits
Eiffel Software is committed to offering its products on the largest possible
number of operating systems to enable its users to take advantage of the latest
advances in this area. Combining the power of Eiffel Software products with the
latest enhancements in the area of hardware and operating systems enables
companies using Eiffel to constantly increase the competitive edge of their IT
department as well as save even more time and money. This is why EiffelStudio
5.6 will be released on the following additional platforms: Solaris X, X 86 and
Sparc as well as Solaris/Sparc 64 bits.
* EiffelEnvision 2.5 now available
EiffelEnvision 2.5, the Eiffel Plug-in for VisualStudio .NET, is now available
for download. EiffelEnvision 2.5 is an important part of the Eiffel Development
Framework as it offers VisualStudio developers the full power of Eiffel within
the environment they are used to.
With EiffelEnvision 2.5 developers will enjoy:
* A new way to manage all their project files and Eiffel cluster libraries,
directly from Visual Studio .NET's Solution Explorer in real-time, mirroring all
external disk activity. They will know exactly what is going on and what they
can expect to be compiled into their EiffelEnvision projects.
* Improvements and optimizations in all aspects related to project
building: a better, more suited .NET type and method name mapping to Eiffel
classes and features, faster and tunable incremental compilation speeds, and
building on an as-needed basis, vastly improving compilation for solutions
containing many EiffelEnvision projects.
* A feature complete Eiffel editor with automatic source outlining, feature
indexes, clearer differentiation between keywords, classes, features and
symbols, and a fully customizable color scheme.
* Other improvements include: Simplified integration in Source Code Control,
enhancements to deployment projects, a new tool to convert EiffelStudio
projects, integrated HTML report generation and a look and feel more consistent
with other Visual Studio .NET languages.
Download EiffelEnvision, Free Edition, today at:
http://www.eiffel.com/downloads/
Order EiffelEnvision 2.5 now and save with the EiffelEnvision Special:
http://www.eiffel.com/products/envsn/envision_25_special.html
* Eiffel Training
Eiffel Software is organizing a week long trainging session entitled, Hands-On
O-O Development Using Eiffel, from August 22-26, in Santa Barbara, California.
Participants will learn the techniques of Object-Oriented Software Construction
and learn how to program with the latest version of EiffelStudio. For more
information, please visit:
http://www.eiffel.com/services/training/hands-on/
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IN THE PRESS
* New EiffelWorld column by Dr. Bertrand Meyer
"The power of simplicity"
The best defense against falling prey to technology fashion is to be skeptical
of complex solutions. Is the complexity warranted? Sometimes it is, but often
it's just a smokescreen to hide the existence of simple and effective answers.
Take the basic idea of object technology: to use the power of software modeling
techniques -- essentially, abstract data types -- to describe systems of just
any kind. The idea was there from the beginning, and Eiffel took it to its full
development thanks to Design by Contract (and multiple inheritance, genericity,
deferred classes, Uniform Access, Command-Query Separation...etc). This is a
threat to an entire industry that thrives on complexity and incompatibility: if
you have different formalisms for thinking, communicating and implementing, then
you need consultants and tools to translate between the different levels. Quick
(the strategy seems to have been), let's preempt the "object oriented" name --
it sounds cute -- and get back to the old order where the coders coded and the
analysts analyzed: we'll use C++ and Java for implementation, so that no
ordinary human being can understand the code, and UML for description, so that
there is no semantics of any kind. This will give us an entire industry. It will
also give us PhD thesis topics, such as trying to define what semantics UML
might have.
Then (ten years later) we'll pretend to find out that there is a gap to be
filled: new opportunities! New acronyms, for example: "Model Driven
Architecture", as if Kristen Nygaard hadn't taught us back in 1970 or so that
good programming is modeling in the first place. Modeling, of course, is passé.
Today we talk about "metamodeling". (It is a pretty good principle of a blissful
life to stop listening whenever you hear a word that starts with "meta". There
may be a couple of exceptions but you don't risk them by ignoring them.)
Eiffel protects you from all that waste of time. The idea is simple: the schemes
of object technology, originally developed for programming, are in fact schemes
for thinking -- about systems, about the world. We use them to tackle complexity
and devise robust, extendible architectures. (The architecture doesn't have to
be "model-driven": it *is* the model!). Then we turn them into software
implementations, smoothly and seamlessly. We don't distinguish between the
program and the model of the program: the program is just the model refined to
full implementability. We work in a single context from beginning to end, using
the same concepts (classes, contracts and all the powerful modeling techniques
of object technology), the same notation (Eiffel text, or graphical equivalents
to it which can constantly and effortlessly be mapped back and forth), the same
software support (EiffelStudio). We don't need to invest in a multitude of
tools, and translators between these tools. We need fewer people. And if the
external conditions change, we have a much easier job adapting the software,
since it's really the same product as the model describing these conditions.
There are very few Three-Letter-Acronyms in all this, and very little that would
qualify as "meta". But if you are fed up with pretentious and expensive
approaches that leave you dizzy with grandiose phrases and short on actual
results, you might try simplicity for a change.
-- Bertrand Meyer
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* Upcoming talks by Dr. Meyer
- 14 June 2005: Invited presentation at Integrated Design & Process Technology
Symposium, Peking, China
- 18 June 2005: Keynote at 10th IEEE Int.l Conference on Engineering Complex
Computer Systems, Shanghai, China
* LASER 2005: Software engineering for concurrent and real-time systems,
September 11 - 17, 2005 Elba, Italy
Research in software engineering is making steady progress, too much of which
unfortunately remains unknown to practitioners. The aim of the LASER school is
to distribute the results of that research to a wider audience and in turn
foster new ideas. The school is intended for professional software engineers and
managers who want to benefit from recent advances in software technology as well
as for researchers (including PhD students).
The 2005 LASER school brings together six of the best experts in the field of
concurrent and real-time systems. Each will present a series of six lectures on
his or her latest research efforts. The six speakers
are: Laura Dillon (Michigan State University), Bertrand Meyer (ETH Zurich/Eiffel
Software), Jay Misra (University of Texas at Austin), Amir Pnueli (Technion),
Wolfgang Pree (University of Salzburg), Joseph Sifakis (Verimag).
For more information and registration visit:
http://se.inf.ethz.ch/laser/2005/.
Deadline to register is June 20, 2005.
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EIFFEL CORNER
* Eiffel libraries freely available
Interested in finding out what is going on in the Eiffel world? Look no further.
You can find various libraries complementing the already rich set of libraries
included with the delivery of EiffelStudio. These libraries are free and
available for download at
http://se.inf.ethz.ch/download/index.html
* Focus on Graph Library
EiffelBase is intended to be a general, high-quality library covering the basic
needs of everyday programming. It offers data structures to organize data and
algorithms which can be applied to those data structures. The library design
dates back to 1985 in its first form; that it has stood the test of time and is
still used in so many new applications is a testimony to its solidity. The
classes of the Graph Library extend EiffelBase in a number of areas not yet
covered: graphs, topological sort and B trees. You can download the Eiffel Graph
Library from
http://se.inf.ethz.ch/download/index.html
* User Group meetings
Colorado Usergroup meeting -- The last Thursday of the month at 6:30 PM at
Fowler Software Design. For directions to Fowler Software please
visit:
http://www.fowlersoftware.com/
Bay Area Friends of Eiffel -- Will meet in Orinda at Axa Rosenberg, on June 9,
at 6:30 PM. Meeting agenda includes discussion of creating a website for the
Eiffel Wiki for the Open Source community using Eiffel. Directions to Axa
offices can be found at
http://www.axarosenberg.com/axar-contact.htm/axar-location-orinda.htm. For
more information, contact Greg Compestine,
gcompestine@axarosenberg.com.
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The Eiffel Software Team
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