Events

CodeCity: Visual Exploration of Large-Scale Evolving Software

The comprehensive understanding of today’s software systems is a daunting activity, because of the size and complexity that such systems exhibit. Moreover, software systems evolve, which dramatically increases the amount of data one needs to analyze in order to gain insights into such systems. Indeed, software complexity is recognized as one of the major challenges to the development and maintenance of industrial-size software projects. Our vision is a 3D visualization approach that helps software people build knowledge about their systems. We settled on an intuitive metaphor, which depicts software systems as cities. To validate the ideas emerging from our research, we implemented a tool called CodeCity, available at: http://codecity.inf.usi.ch. We devised a set of visualization techniques to support tasks related to program comprehension, design quality assessment, and evolution analysis, and applied them on large open-source systems written in Java, C++, or Smalltalk.
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Jini: The Forgotten Distributed Architecture Shangri La

Jini is not a new or hype technology (at least not any more;-), so why spend our precious time talking about it? Arguably, there might be some value in looking at it from the perspective of more than ten years since its inception and in the context of the ubiquitous embedded and mobile systems spreading around us. In this talk we will review the design principles of the Jini architecture as a logical and natural consequence of the Java platform extended to the network. We will also discuss some past deployment examples of the Jini technology and its problems and limitations. The burning question we should pose ourselves during (and hopefully after;-) this presentation is how can we build large-scale, long-lived distributed systems that can outlive the platforms they are running on.
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