The conceptual perspective [Object Technology]
bject technology is here to stay. For a while, after object-oriented ideas burst onto the software scene in the mid-eighties, we heard people say, “It’s just a fad and will go away like the others.” Not any more. The commitment of the big players is proof enough. Just mention your favorite household name in hardware or software; almost certainly it has defined an “all object” software policy (although one might quibble about how seriously they are doing it, how much is show and how much is reality). True, except for banking, networking, and other areas with particularly demanding requirements, the spread of 00 ideas is not as universal in the applications software community as in the core group of computer vendors and major software houses. But the move is irresistible, and very few software experts doubt that object technology is the way to go. Not since Dijkstra came up with structured programming around 1970 has any idea affected so deeply how we think about software.

title: Dependable Software
abstract: Achieving software reliability takes many complementary tech-niques, directed at the process or at the products. This survey summarizes some of the most fruitful ideas.

title: The unspoken revolution in software engineering
abstract: In this article the author describes the outsourcing aspects of software engineering. The author finds outsourcing so fascinating partly because it serves as a magnifier and revelator of just about everything in software engineering. The development of offshoring also raises a new challenge for those of us entrusted with educating future software professionals in the industrialized world.

title: Concurrent object-oriented programming on .NET
abstract: The SCOOP model (Simple concurrent object-oriented programming) offers a comprehensive approach to building high-quality concurrent and distributed systems. The model takes advantage of the inherent concurrency implicit in object-oriented programming to provide programmers with a simple extension enabling them to produce concurrent applications with little more effort than sequential ones. In the paper, the authors discuss the basic concepts of the model, such as processors and separate objects. They also present SCOOPLI, a library implementation of SCOOP for the .NET platform. They show how SCOOP concepts are mapped to .NET constructs, and discuss distributed programming with SCOOPLI, with a focus on .NET Remoting capabilities. Several programming examples illustrate the discussion.

title: The Component Combinator for Enterprise Applications

title: Library Design

title: Prediction of Material Properties from Chemical Structures. The Clearing Temperature of Nematic Liquid Crystals Derived from Their Chemical Structures by Artificial Neural Networks
abstract: The prediction of properties of molecules just on the basis of their chemical structures is desirable to selectively make molecules that have the wanted properties, like biological activity, viscosity, or toxicity. Here, we present an example of a new way to predict a property from the chemical structure of a chemically heterogeneous class of compounds. The clearing temperatures of nematic liquid-crystalline phases of 17383 compounds were used to train neural networks to derive this material property directly from their chemical structure. The trained neural networks were subsequently tested with 4345 structural patterns of molecules unknown to the networks to assess their predictive value. The clearing temperatures were predicted by the best network with a standard deviation of 13 degrees.

title: Design and evaluation of an adaptive icon toolbar
abstract: As information systems become increasingly important in many different domains, the potential to adapt them to individual users and their needs also becomes more important. Adaptive user interfaces offer many possible ways to adjust displays and improve procedures for a user's individual patterns of work. This paper describes an attempt to design an adaptive user interface in a computer environment familiar to many users. According to one classification of adaptive user interfaces, the adaptive bar described in this paper would be classified as a user-controlled self-adaptation system.At the user's convenience, the adaptive bar offers suggestions for adding or removing command icons, based on the frequency and probability of specific commands. It also implements these changes once the user has agreed to them. Beyond the adaptive bar, the general behavior of the whole user interface does not change, thereby allowing the user to maintain a clear general model of the system. This paper describes the decision-making algorithm implemented in the bar. It also describes the bar's self-adaptive behavior of displaying the frequency of each icon's use through the icon's size. Finally, we present some encouraging preliminary results of evaluations by users.