Technische Universität München
Institut für Informatik
FORSOFT Teilprojekt ZEN
Research Tools and Prototypes We Work On
LiSa
Change and evolution of business and technology imply change
and evolution of the applied software development processes.
Besides that for a certain enterprise or a project we want usually
integrate elements from a variety of existing process models,
comprising generic standards as well as specific development
methods.
The concept of process patterns enables us to develop, describe,
and improve development processes in a way such that change,
evolution, and integration of processes are facilitated. Founded on
a general software development process framework we sketch the
idea of a living software development process. To its fully extend
knowledge based tool support is required. LiSa provides a
sophisticated tool support for a living software development
process.
PalME – Secure Palm-based Money Exchange
Electronic payment systems emerge as serious alternative to conventional payment methods, such as hard cash, bank transfer, or
EC-Cards. These systems play an important role for the electronic commerce via internet. For example, the GeldKarte (Gieseke&Devrient/ZKA) is
already popular in Germany, because of the integration in EC-Cards. It permits convenient payment in shops, on automata, or in fast food restaurants.
Payment services for the internet with the GeldKarte are in
preparation.
In the project PalME we developed an electronic purse application for the PalmPilot PDA. The user doesn’t need a specific hardware besides his PDA (and optionally an integrated SmartCard). The PDA can be simultaneously used for displaying the current sum of money within the purse and shows transaction data for a revision, for instance. Furthermore, the system permits the transfer of money between users without a third party instance (off-line purse to purse transaction) and so
the PalME purse can be used as a substitute for hard cash. An important requirement was the
convenient use of the purse.
The exemplary environment for the use of the system is the chair of software and systems engineering of the technical university of Munich. The assistants change hard cash in
electronic currency and transfer money to other assistants or pay beverages with the system.
At the development of electronic payment systems the security aspect plays a centric role. One of the greatest barriers of the electronic commerce in the internet is the lack of confidence from the user side. Independent institutions evaluate and certificate E-Commerce systems to get warranty of confidence. For the certification of security critical systems an international standard has emerged, the Common Criteria (CC). The PalME system was developed under consideration of the CC. The requirements from the CC on the development process have been considered (e.g.
modeling, configuration management, testing) and the necessary documents have been created during processing.
From the project outflow we derived important perceptions for the software engineering of certified, security critical systems. The arisen System is open and
expandable.
CROFT
CROFT is the realization of an architecture for Group Knowledge Management Systems based on Enterprise
Java Beans (EJBs) that has been developed at the Technical University of Munich
during a three month project with seven staff members and 15 studentes.
The system allows the cooperative management of information about staff members, work groups,
documents and addresses within an organization. There is a public homepage for every user and every work group
containig public information and a private workspace where internal data can be collected, processed and
exchanged. CROFT comprises a HTML-based user interface and an integrated security
concept.
DesignIt
Component-based software development and software architectures are
current buzz words. Technologies like Enterprise Java Beans or CORBA
are available providing the basic infrastrucutre for componentware
concepts. Unfortunately, modeling or description techniques as well
as tools or prototyping environments aren't available yet.
The basic goal of the project "DesignIt" is to realize a new prototyping
environement similar to AutoMate but based on new techniques and new
concepts. DesignIt consists out of two main parts:
The first one is a run-time environment or simply called a container.
This container should be build on top of the Enterprise Java Bean
Infrastructure. Almost all functionality is already provided by
Enterprise Java Beans. One has only to add some new features to
realize the specified component model.
The second one is a generator that generates from UML class files
containing OCL statements the code for the components that can be
executed in the container.
SmartEvent
Application development for tiny, intelligent devices has to deal with
considerable hardware limitations, especially with regard to storage
capacity and communication facilities. Furthermore, most devices offer
only very limited low-level programming interfaces, complicating the
integration of small devices into large-scale architectures.
SmartEvent is an efficient software architecture for connecting small
devices to existing standard event and notification services, like for
instance a CORBA Event Service. SmartEvent shows how the approach
simplifies the communication with small devices and describe how
security aspects are integrated.
AutoMate
AutoMate is an adapter for integrating Versant’s object-oriented database
and Iona’s CORBA im-plementation Orbix on the Windows NT platform. The
special feature of the AutoMate adapter: Programming effort is greatly
reduced, as the server code of a distributed three-tier architecture is
fully generated from object models designed within the CASE-tool Rational
Rose. Generation and initialization of all necessary components take less
than ten minutes on an average PC. AutoMate also provides a set of
comfortable management components in the application layer of the server,
like for object creation, naming, queries, or transactions.
Accessing an object-oriented databases via CORBA has many advantages. Put
in the words of Berhard Wöbker, CEO of Versant Europe: “The combination
of Java, CORBA, and OODBMS en-ables customers to realize modern, distributed
applications that match well with their existing IT infrastructure.
AutoMate shows that the integration of proven, industrial-strength base
components provides new means to users. Using a CASE tool considerably
raises developer productivity.”
