C-ARCTIC: Concurrent environment and architecture for telecollaboration integrated in the company

• Research unit: EU RFP
• Project number: 00.0011

Key words (English)

Distributed systems; collaborative work; teleworking; concurrency; software engineering

Alternative project number (English)

EU project number: IST-1999-20087

Research programs (English)

EU-programme: 5. Frame Research Programme - 1.2.4 Essential technologies and infrastructures

Short description (English)

See abstract

Partners and International Organizations (English)

Coordinator: SIP (E)

Abstract (English)

Results provided by the Laboratory of Computer Networks to the project C-ARCTIC

In this project, we have created an environment for the development of interactive applications that offers a set of generators for the creation of graphical user interfaces, remote method calls and accesses to the databases. The output of these generators are modules that can easily be assembled thanks to their construction based on a concept of synchronous active objects. Unlike what happens with many other generators, our modules are easy to read and to maintain and allow the encapsulation of the listeners (a basic concept in Java), which have been shown to lead to very unstructured programs.
We have also studied the compatibility of our approach with the J2EE Java standard, a requirement of C-ARCTIC. We are capable of executing, in the same memory partition, and without breaking our modular structure, our synchronous objects, EJBs (Enterprise Java Beans) and servlets used for the creation of HTML pages. This demonstration shows that our approach is indeed compatible with the legacy systems.
Our developments have been used by the partners in their own work packages: a database for a hospital in Barcelona, a system for the registration of courses in Scottland and a concept of virtual office allowing a group of persons to work together.
We have presented our results in two conferences and will present a tutorial about realtime Java programs, where we will introduce our experience about concurrency and introduce the concepts developed for this project.
Software engineering is currently very weak as far as the coding phase is concerned, and that is certainly a reason why so many projects are late, over-budget and do not fill there specifications. Our work is an important contribution to that problem.

References in databases (English)

Swiss Database: Euro-DB of the
State Secretariat for Education and Research
Hallwylstrasse 4
CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland
Tel. [phone]
Swiss Project-Number: 00.0011