CSEIC News Briefs, W/E Aug. 22, 1997

CSEIC News Briefs, W/E Aug. 22, 1997

[CSEIC]

Computer Systems Engineering News Briefs
Week Ending:  August 22, 1997

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SAC'98 ADA AND SOFTWARE ENGINEERING TRACK
Topic:  Ada

A special track on Ada and Software Engineering will be held at the ACM 
Symposium on Applied Computing 1998 (SAC'98) in Atlanta, GA, February 27 
- March 1, 1998.  It will be a forum for engineers, researchers and 
practitioners throughout the world to share technical ideas and 
experiences relating to Ada applications and Software Engineering.  

Original papers, tutorials, and panel proposals are invited in all areas of 
Ada applications and Software Engineering technology.  For more 
information, contact:  <mailto:haddad@acm.org>.

SOURCE:  Ada User Journal, June 1997, v18, n2, pp. 62-63.

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REUSE MODEL FOR JAVA DEVELOPERS
Topic: Reuse

Sun Microsystems' JavaBeans component architecture provides developers with
a tool capable of generating reusable components regardless of the 
operating environment or tool used to create the code.  A JavaBean is a 
Java software element that opens its features to a development tool, 
which allows the bean's features to be manipulated by a builder during 
construction. JavaBeans integrate and complement existing Java APIs to 
create a true enterprise computing environment.

SOURCE:  Baluta, Basil, "Reuse Model for Java Developers," InformationWeek: 
Apr 28, 1997; COPYRIGHT 1997 CMP Publications Inc.

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BENEFITS OF REUSE
Topic: Reuse

Software reuse offers many potential benefits for Information Systems (IS) 
organizations, but it requires that IS change the way it develops 
software. Development cycles are made shorter, developers are made more 
productive, and code is of higher quality and is easier to maintain, but 
reuse requires a change in the way programmers think about development, 
and it needs the support of the entire organization.
 
Managers often back off when they realize the investment required by 
reuse, not in the cost of tools but in the long-term commitment to design 
for reuse from the start. It can sometimes take two or three attempts to 
get a reusable software framework right. For example, Purolator Courier's 
development costs increased 20 percent when it adopted code reuse, due 
primarily to the extra time required to analyze the business and company 
strategy, but it now has about 20 core reusable business components 
implementing its primary business processes.

SOURCE:  Radding, Alan, "Benefits of reuse," InformationWeek: Mar 31, 1997;
COPYRIGHT 1997 CMP Publications Inc.
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TASH AVAILABLE ON ADAIC WEB SITE
Topic: Ada

TASH: A Free Platform-Independent Graphical User Interface Development 
Toolkit for Ada
                    
Accessible on the Ada Information Clearinghouse (AdaIC) Web Site at: 
<http://sw-eng.falls-church.va.us/AdaIC/docs/reports/westley/>, TASH,
a platform-independent Application Programming Interface (API) for 
developing Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), is described. This API 
includes a complete "thin" binding to Tcl and an experimental "thick" 
binding to Tk from Ada 95. Several features of Ada 95 such as access to 
subprograms, tagged types, and interface to C were used in this binding. 
In addition to HTML, the paper is also available in Postscript, Text, and MS 
Word 7.0 format.

SOURCE:  AdaIC

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