Trusted Components

Bertrand Meyer, Winter semester 2003/2004

Still available: last year's page.

Announcements

February 20th, 2004

• You can have a look at the solution for execise 1 by Sébastien Vaucouleur as a reference. I think he came up with a good design. Also his documentation was very good.

January 27th, 2004

• A topic overview to help you prepare for the exam is available.

January 25th, 2004

• The exam from 2002 including answers is available. Please note that the content of the current course has had a much stronger emphasis on formal methods.

January 14th, 2004

• Schedule updated

December 26th, 2003

• Exercise 2: B Method is available.
• Slides from the two lectures on the B Method are available at their corresponding dates.

November 25th, 2003

• Chapter on axiomatic semantics (from Bertrand Meyer's book Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages). Please don't reproduce because this is copyrighted material.

November 17th, 2003

• New slides available.
• Schedule has been updated.

October 31st, 2003

• Exercise 1: Design by Contract is available.
• Schedule has been updated.

October 23rd, 2003

• Guest lecture by "Erik Meijer" added.

October 19th, 2003

• Organizational information sheet added.

October 7th, 2003

• Preliminary version of the course page.

Description

Title and code

Trusted Components
Course code: 37-239
See official ETH page on this course

Scope

The prospect of component-based development is one of the greatest hopes for the advancement of software engineering. But it assumes that the components are of high enough quality. Surprisingly, no real standards exist in this area. This course will explore the techniques available to guarantee that components can be trusted.

Prerequisites

Experience with O-O development and, preferably, a component model.

Schedule

Weekly schedule

• Monday 9.00 - 11.00, IFW C42.
• Wednesday 10.00 - 12.00, RZ F21.

Office hours: By appointment, RZ-J6

Semester schedule (tentative)

Grading

Important: No "Testat" is delivered or "mündliche Prüfung" provided for this course. The only way to get a grade is to take the exam and the exercises. This applies regardless of your department or status.

• There are two exercises issue that have to be solved: One is a modelling and programming exercise in Eiffel, the other is a modelling, programming and proving exercise in B. There are no groups, everybody has to solve each exercises by him-/herself.
• There is a final exam in the last lecture. The exam will take the full 90 minutes of the lecture and will contain questions related to the content of the lecture and to the exercises.
• The final grade is calculated as follows: 30% from the grading of each exercise solution, 40% from the grading of the exam.

References and Literature

• Clemens Szyperski: Component Software, Addison-Wesley, 1998.
• Bertrand Meyer: Object-Oriented Software Construction, second edition, Prentice Hall, 1997.
• Bertrand Meyer: Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages, Prentice-Hall, 1990.
• Jean-Raymond Abrial: The B-Book, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Martin Abadi, Luca Cardelli: A Theory of Objects, Springer-Verlag, 1996.

Contacts

Contact assistant for the course: Bernd Schoeller (http://se.inf.ethz.ch/people/schoeller, Office: RZ-J22)

Guest Lectures

Erik Meijer: Programming with Rectangles, Triangles, and Circles
Microsoft Research

Abstract:

We will argue that by properly generalizing the type system and expression syntax, it is possible for any modern object oriented language to provide first class support for manipulating both relational and hierarchical data in a sound and statically typed manner. The type system extensions, however, are not based on XML Schemas. We show that XSDs and the XML data model do not fit well with the class-based nominal type system and object graph representation of our target languages. Instead we propose to extend object-oriented type system with new structural types that model XSD sequences, choices, and all-groups. We demonstrate our language and type system by translating a selection of the XQuery use cases.

About the lecturer:

You might know me as the "Head In The Box" from the wildly popular VBTV show, as "Professor ILDasm" from a series that never went beyond the first pilot episode, but my real job is technical lead in the WebData group at Microsoft. Prior to joining Microsoft I was an associate professor at Utrecht University and adjunct professor at the Oregon Graduate Institute in Portland. I am one of the proud designers of the standard lazy functional programming language Haskell98.

My holy grail is to hide complicated mechanisms behind simple abstractions. Programming languages are an ideal medium to achieve this, and I am continuously looking for widely used APIs and often occurring programming pattern boilerplate to promote into first class language features. Currently my targets are XML and SQL, and asynchronous programming. By providing deep language support for these concepts, it hopefully becomes easier to program distributed three-tier applications.

I maintain a blog at http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/emeijer/.