99
Invited Talk
"Lightweight And Electric Object Models"
Daniel Jackson, MIT
Object models play a central role in almost all object-oriented development
methods. Until now, however, object models have not been analyzable. I'll
explain a new approach to object modelling comprising a simple and precise
notation and a fully automatic analysis. The notation, Alloy, is designed
to be as expressive as possible while retaining tractability, and supports
a lightweight style of modelling that allows essential properties to be
described tersely and naturally. Its analysis tool, Alcoa, makes object
models "electric", by animating invariants and operations. As a result,
object modelling is a more fun and compelling activity that combines the
immediacy and concreteness of programming with the abstraction and partiality
of formal specification.
More details at: http://sdg.lcs.mit.edu/alcoa/.
Daniel Jackson
is the Ross Career Development Professor of Software Technology at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is the co-leader of the Laboratory
for Computer Science?s Software Design Group. He received an MA from Oxford
University (1984) in Physics, and his SM (1988) and PhD (1992) from MIT
in Computer Science. He has been a software engineer for Logica UK Ltd.
(1984-1986), and has worked for several large corporations, including AT&T,
Digital and Fujitsu. He was Assistant Professor of Computer Science at
Carnegie Mellon University (1992 -1997), where he was a designer of the
curriculum for the Masters of Software Engineering degree. He is associate
editor of several leading journals in software engineering, and has served
on the programme committee of more than 30 international conferences. He
has broad interests in several areas of software construction, including
development methods, automatic analysis of designs and specifications,
and reverse engineering of code.