Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology
School of Information Technology
Department of Computer Science
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
Computer vendors roll out new operating systems with increasing frequency. Such systems sometimes disturb the stability of critical software that depends on machine-specific features, such as the way in which user-interfaces are handled.
There is also a need for software to be able to migrate to different platforms, both for economic reasons, and in order to take advantage of new devices, especially in the mobile and pocket computing sphere.
Bishop has developed methodologies to prolong the lifetime of expensive software by enabling machine-dependent components to be identified, monitored, and exchanged.
The work builds on an ongoing collaboration with Microsoft Research in the UK, which earlier produced the Views system for language and platform independent graphical user interfaces.
The researchers were able to remove all the platform dependent parts of the Views system, and interface them with a platform independent graphical user interface of their own design. The interface was then linked to the Qt windowing toolkit. Experiments have shown that the ViewsQt library is portable on all major computer platforms.
The work is being presented at the major software engineering conference in 2006, ICSE, and as a keynote address at the SE Week at NASA. It promises to give small and large companies a better chance of surviving the constant changes in software, which are thrust on consumers.
Prof Judith Bishop
Computer Science
+27 (0) 12 420 3057
jbishop@cs.up.ac.za
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