ECOOP / Tutorial 30

Tutorial Title

Abstract

Have you ever run into the question of how to scope a component to make it reusable? Or how to achieve flexible designs without paying the performance cost for abstraction? Or how to encapsulate abstract features such as performance requirements in the code? Generative Programming (GP) addresses these and many more issues in developing reusable software. Building on the system-family approach, it complements object-oriented methods with notations and techniques to perform domain scoping and feature modeling. It also provides techniques for deriving a common family architecture and components. Finally, it deploys generative technologies to automatically assemble components based on specifications that programmers can conveniently express in their application code. Participants will learn the basic concepts of GP, and how to perform feature modeling, derive components and architectures from feature models, design domain-specific languages, and implement generators using readliy available techniques such as frame-processing technology or C++ template metaprogramming. After presenting some basic concepts and a small, but complete example, each step of the GP process will be discussed in more depth, and the participants will have a chance to experience it in hands-on-exercises. We will round up the tutorial with an outlook on future, advanced generative technologies such as active libraries and active sources.
Generative programming builds on system-family engineering, aspect-oriented programming and other emerging paradigms and puts the focus on maximizing the automation of application development: given a system specification in a domain-specific language, a concrete system is automatically assembled out of reusable components. Using examples, experiments, and hands-on exercises, this tutorial gives the basic motivation for the shift to software system family engineering, provides an overview of the process of generative programming and its work products, explains the necessary modeling techniques and notations, and presents generative programming techniques using C++ and frame-processing technology.

Presenter Profile

Ulrich W. Eisenecker

Ulrich W. Eisenecker (eisenecker@informatik.fh-kl.de) is a professor for computer science at the University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern, Zweibruecken, where he directs the Institute of Componentware and Window-Interfaces. He has been working on generative programming for more than five years and is responsible for several projects in generative programming research funded by industry and public institutes. He co-authored (together with Krzysztof Czarnecki) the book "Generative Programming: Methods, Tools, and Applications", Addison-Wesley, 2000.

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