CAREER: From Incidental Algorithms to Reusable Components: Managing the Emergent Complexity of Large-Scale Software Systems

职业：从附带算法到可重用组件：管理大型软件系统的新兴复杂性

• 批准号: 0845861
• 负责人: Jaakko Jarvi
• 金额: $ 40.28万
• 依托单位: Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2009
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2009-07-01 至 2014-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0845861&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Incidental; Algorithms; Reusable; Components

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009(Public Law 111-5).Real-world software systems are large, complex artifacts built up over multiple layers of abstraction using diverse collections of components. Though individual components are often reusable, code that manages interactions between components seldom is. Such code is large-scale itself, and encodes significant amounts of application logic. A potential for communication between components, typically effected by message passing between objects, forms incidental structures in a program. Though such structures are real data structures, they lack an explicit representation in program code and at run time, and are thus difficult to reuse, manipulate programmatically, and reason about. This project focuses on identifying incidental structures that arise in important domains of mainstream programming---human interfaces in particular---and modeling them as declaratively specified explicit software artifacts. The hypothesis is that large amounts of ad-hoc code can be obsoleted, and replaced by reusable algorithms and components.The particular source of incidental data structures in user interfaces is the event handling code, implementing propagation of values, validation logic, interface element enabling logic, scripting support, etc. The project seeks to demonstrate that these functionalities, typically implemented with application-specific non-reusable code, are not specific to a particular user interface; they can be realized with reusable generic algorithms, parameterized over a (declaratively specified) model that captures the relations, as a system of constraints, between values manipulated by the user interface.The proposed work will impact future large-scale software development, aiming to realize substantially increased productivity and software that is more reliable, efficient, and predictable.

该奖项是根据2009年《美国复苏和再投资法案》(Public Law 111-5)资助的。真实世界的软件系统是使用不同组件集合在多个抽象层上构建的大型复杂构件。虽然单个组件通常是可重用的，但管理组件之间交互的代码很少是可重用的。这样的代码本身规模很大，并且编码了大量的应用程序逻辑。通常由对象之间的消息传递实现的组件之间的通信潜力形成了程序中的附带结构。尽管这样的结构是真实的数据结构，但它们在程序代码和运行时缺乏显式表示，因此难以重用、以编程方式操作和推理。这个项目专注于识别在主流编程的重要领域中出现的附带结构-特别是人机界面-并将它们建模为声明性指定的显式软件构件。用户界面中附带数据结构的特定来源是事件处理代码，实现了值的传播、验证逻辑、界面元素使能逻辑、脚本支持等。该项目试图证明，这些功能通常由特定于应用程序的不可重用代码实现，并不是特定于特定用户界面的；它们可以用可重复使用的通用算法来实现，并在(声明性指定的)模型上进行参数化，该模型将用户界面操纵的值之间的关系捕捉为约束系统。拟议的工作将影响未来的大规模软件开发，旨在实现显著提高的生产率和更可靠、更高效和更可预测的软件。