Software Tools of the Future

An anonymous reader writes "What are the sofware tools of the future going to be? It's an interesting question, with many facets. Here are some important trends in design and construction tool strategy, which will effect the kinds of software tools that will be delivered in the future. It looks at how to improve software development efficiency through visual modeling, generating code from abstract models, and systematic reuse."

Comments

Re:Eclipse!

[eenglish_ca]

Eclipse has a great design no doubt. Automatic code generation through the use of omondo was very helpful in the work I have done with it. However, being a program written in Java it suffers from serious lag even with Java 1.5. It just cannot keep up with Anjuta or KDevelop in terms of raw speed. This may not seem like a serious impedement but it can make working with it quite irritating. Given that using java does give it platform independence, there are solutions like gtk for windows and mac or wx windows in terms of the gui.

Additionally, I have found it quite buggy when running it on Solaris and Redhat based systems at school where i've primarily used it. I shouldn't have to delete my workspace directory just to get it to run as I have needed to.

These issues need to be resolved before it can be considered seriously.

Re:Usability in Non-MS Environments

[Guillermito]

Eclipse is not just for Java. You can use it for C and C++, python, COBOL, among others.

MDA, Code generation, and the like

[SlySpy007]

As systems beome more complex and the amount of code required to do it grows, we need to actively find new strategies to help us create better software faster. Development activites also need to be tailored to suit other related activites, most notably verification and validation. MDA is a good step because it allows the developer to focus on the higher level concerns of the system, and step back from some of the code level concerns. Code generators and transformational systems are an excellent counterpart -- if you have a modeling language with a formal syntax and well-defined semantics, you can easily write very powerful transformational tools to spit out anything you like -- models in a different representation, code, test cases, graphs...the list goes on. A colleague of mine has a saying "No more software engineers"; I personally think he's on to something. We as a profession spend altogether too much time worrying about code-level concerns and the like, when to make more robust, fault-tolerant, higher-performance systems we need to spend more time focusing on higher-level system concerns.

Some links to check out on these topics:

Semantic Designs (makers of a very powerful, generic transformational environment) http://semdesigns.com/

Link to Nic Rouquettes slides from a talk on MDA at the UML 2003 conference) http://ase.arc.nasa.gov/uml03/rouquette.pdf

Link to an article from ACM Computer magazine (last january I think) about MDS, and project at JPL which aims to incorporate some of these ideas into the design of a robust, re-usable flight software platform http://www.computer.org/computer/homepage/0104/Reg an/r1059.pdf

Refactoring Browsers (eg, Eclipse)

[sean.geek.nz]

Refactoring Browsers were a radical change 2 years ago, and improved coding immensely.

But the claim that they "aren't commonly used" is bunk. They are in very common use today. Eclipse, IDEA, JBuilder, etc. Java IDES have made a huge leap in the last 2 years, and they rock.

They succeeded because they weren't trying to reinvent programming. They just aim to make coding easier and better.

Why non-Java IDEs haven't caught up, I don't know. The worst part by far of having to deal with C++ is that these days the tool support just isn't up to the standard of Eclipse or IDEA. emacs does great stuff with syntax, but it can't replace an IDE that is tracking the codes semantics and making clever use of that knowledge.

sean