Status Report: A Technology Investigation Supporting Software Architecture and Analysis for Evolution
Agreement/Contract Number: F30602-97-2-0031
For the period: July 1998 through September 1998
Principal Investigators:
David Garlan and Mary Shaw
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891
E-mail:
garlan@cs.cmu.edu, mary.shaw@cs.cmu.edu
WWW Homepage: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~Compose/
Voice:
412-268-5056 (Garlan); 412-268-2589 (Shaw)
FAX:
412-268-5576  

1.0 Participants

Carnegie Mellon University

Faculty

David Garlan Associate Professor of Computer Science
Mary Shaw Alan J. Perlis Professor of Computer Science, Associate Dean for Professional Programs
Jeannette Wing Professor of Computer Science

Graduate Students

Shawn Butler
Craig Damon
Robert DeLine
Darrell Kindred
Robert Monroe
Robert O'Callahan
Siddhartha Puri
Bridget Spitznagel
Zhenyu Wang
Hao-Chi Wong

Visitors and Postdocs

John Ockerbloom Postdoctoral Fellow

Staff

Gregory Zelesnik Principal Research Programmer
Andrew Kompanek Senior Research Programmer

2.0 Ongoing Research & Development

The following are the on-going research and development activities for the Composable Software Systems group.

Work was done on Ajax analysis tool for Java to increase its coverage of the Java bytecode language.Work was also done on applying the type-based analysis of Ajax to the problem of Java bytecode verification for safe execution.

Laydbug was demonstrated at the July EDCS DemoDays conference. The underlying work was presented to a group within NIST in July.

Continued progress on theory generation and the application of the Revere tool on authentication protocols.

Continued development and refinement of Armani language and environment. Began significant beta-testing efforts and application of Armani to several different design domains.

We continue to support users and evaluators of our Acme-based design environment (AcmeStudio), the Acme developer's libraries (Java and C++ AcmeLib), Armani, Lackwit and Revere.

3.0 Notable Accomplishments & Technology Transition

The next generation of UniCon, UniCon 2 was released in its final version before Gregory Zelesnik left the Composable Systems group. A public release version of UniCon 2 that includes better support for a number of features as well as full Acme import/export support isnow available.

We completed an initial version of Ladybug, the replacement for Nitpick. This was given limited release to a handful of researchers plus use in two CMU courses. The released tool is written in Java and can thus run on abroad set of platforms and preforms its checks up to a thousand times faster than Nitpick on real world specifications. A broader public release is expected this spring.

4.0 Progress on Inter/Intra Cluster Collaborations

Daniel Jackson (MIT)

Some components of the Ajax system were reused by Daniel Jackson and his students at MIT in their WOMBLE project. They also used the Lackwit system that were built previously in some of their work on reverse engineering aeronautics software.

COLLABORATION WITH OTHER PROJECTS IN ARCHITECTURE CLUSTER

Peter Feiller (SEI)

Ongoing collaboration with Peter Feiller and Jun Li at SEI using Armani to model real-time preformance and fault-tolerance architectural properties. Also supporting their use of the AcmeStudio environment.

Lockheed-Martin (Creps)

We continued to collaborate with Lockheed Martin, transitioning new versions of our design tools to them for incorporation in demos and pilot projects.

David Wile (USC ISI)

We continued to collaborate with Dave Wile at USC ISI on application of Acme to our ADLs and tools.

COLLABORATION WITH PROJECTS IN HIGH ASSURANCE CLUSTER

No new progress to report.

COLLABORATION WITH PROJECTS IN DESIGN MANAGEMENT CLUSTER

No new progress to report.

COLLABORATION WITH PROJECTS IN DYNAMIC LANGUAGES CLUSTER

No new progress to report.

5.0 Publications

The following are the papers that have been authored by the members of this contract during the reporting period. They have been organized into groups based on their status as submitted, accepted, or published. They represent transition of our research to the community at large.

Published

Wing, J.M, Ockerbloom, J.
Respectful Type Converters
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
Also published as CMU-CS-98-130.

Allen, R. and Garlan, D. and Douence, R.
Specifying Dynamism in Software Architectures
Proceedings of the Workshop on Foundations of
Component-Based Software Engineering

Accepted

DeLine, R.
Avoiding packaging mismatch with Flexible Packaging
To appear in Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering,
Los Angeles, California, 1999.

DeLine, R.
A Catalog of Techniques for Resolving Packaging Mismatch.
To appear in Proceedings of the Syposium on Software Reusability
Los Angeles, California, 1999 

Garlan, D., Wang, Zhenyu.
A Case Study in Software Architecture Interchange.

Allen, R. and Douence, R.and Garlan, D.
Specifying and Analyzing Dynamic Software Architectures
Proceedings of the 1998 Conference on Fundamental
Approaches to Software Engineering (FASE'98)},

Berry, A., Garlan, D.
Making Architectural Analysis Reasonable
Proceedings of the First Working IFIP Conference
on Software Architecture (WICSA1) (Feb 1999)

6.0 Travel

The following are the talks, presentations, panels, lectures, workshops, and demonstrations given by the members of this contract during the reporting period. They represent transition of our research to the community at large.

Jeannette Wing
Talk: Formal Methods: Past, Present, and Future
Fourth Software Reuse Symposium:
From Architectures to Products

Ft. Meade, MD
August 19, 1998.

7.0 Miscellaneous/Administrative/Problematic Issues

8.0 Plans For The Next Reporting Period

Continue supporting Armani and transitioning from research to industry.

Continue work on Ajax to improve its completeness and scalability. Build new analysis tools on top of Ajax.

Continue work on Ladybug and the underlying theoretical foundations.

Continue progress on thesis related to Revere.Continue work on ADL Toolkit and development of Acme-based environment.