The Tools We Use

What's the state of the art in the tools we use to build software? To answer this question, I let a powerful server build from source code about 7,000 open source packages over a period of a month. The packages I built form a subset of the FreeBSD operating system ports collection, comprising a wide spectrum of application domains: from desktop utilities and biology applications to databases and development tools. The collection is representative of modern software because, unlike say a random sample of SourceForge.net projects, FreeBSD developers have found these programs useful enough to port to FreeBSD.     

Tool writing: a forgotten art? (software tools)

The author decided to create a tool to fit the needs. In the process, the author discovered something important: writing stand-alone tools that you can combine efficiently with others to handle more demanding tasks appears to be becoming a forgotten art. The author created a metric tool, named ckjm, using the design principles the author outlined earlier. The tool operates on a list of compiled Java classes specified as arguments or read from its standard input. It then prints to its standard output a single line for each class, containing the class name and the six metrics values. Ant Java-based build tool and adding an XML output option.     

Where's My Jetpack?

Software development tools often fail to deliver on inflated promises. Rather than the predicted progression toward ever-increasing levels of abstraction, two simple trends have driven the evolution of currently available software development tools: integration at the source-code level and a focus on quality. Thus source code has become the bus that tools tap into for communicating with other tools. Also, focus has shifted from defect removal in the later phases to defect prevention in the earlier phases. In the future, tools are likely to support higher levels of abstraction, perhaps in the form of domain-specific languages communicated using XML.     

Coping with TiVo: Opportunities of the networked digital video recorder

Despite the progressive switch to digital TV, there has not been any significant change to the value chain of the TV industry. At the same time, the introduction of novel information and communication technologies, such as the digital video recorder (DVR) and efficient Peer-to-Peer (P2P) content distribution, have been regarded as a threat to the established broadcast business players. Previous research has described these threats and has suggested competitive strategies, but it has not investigated the opportunities. This work aims to identify a framework of new business models that take advantage of the networked DVR. For this purpose, we examined the TV literature from diverse academic disciplines, such as mass communication, computer engineering and advertising research. We have also collaborated with network and multimedia engineers, with broadcasters, and we examined novel interactive television (ITV) prototypes. The findings suggest that the networked DVR could be exploited to provide personalized channels and that the dynamic advertising insertion could be introduced as an effective advertising format. In the light of these findings, the TV industry should consider the pro-active adoption and facilitation of the networked DVR infrastructure.     

Position-annotated photographs: A Geotemporal Web

With the advent of digital cameras, photographs are no longer gathering dust, forgotten in old shoeboxes. Instead, they are lying unused in hard disk dircctories and on CDs. The Geotemporal Web system, belonging to the "capture and access" class of ubiquitous computing applications, addresses this phenomenon by automatically converting raw data from the typical vacation trip into a lively Web site. Exploiting the synergies of integrating different consumer-grade information appliances and publicly accessible databases, a GTWeb site presents a trip overview, timelines, maps, and annotated photographs.     

Explore, excogitate, exploit: component mining

The author describes a process of component mining. His source of candidate components, or his “mine”, is a set of highly respected components from an earlier generation: the famous Unix utilities. He shows how to identify the most promising of these candidates and re-encapsulate them in components that satisfy today's views of component based development, based on the principles of object technology