CSDG maintains an awareness of emerging technology and determines its usefulness within the context of our enterprise environment. Many Penn State administrative departments are developing web applications using the standard object oriented technology. To ensure this technology is used to maximum benefit, CSDG maintains a global object repository and a common base image. In this way all developers can benefit from the work of others by reusing common components. CSDG also builds software tools to maximize productivity and conformance to standards.
Standards based software is faster to build, more reliable and easier to maintain.
By using metadata and standard components it is possible to generate almost all of the code for some applications. CSDG also offers training in Smalltalk - a beginning, intermediate, and advanced course. These are all hands on workshops. Programmers learn the basics of the software tools they will be using, our application development methodology, and the common components used to build simple applications. By the end of training students can assemble a simple web application using the basic components.