Framelets—small and loosely coupled frameworks

If an interactive form in the worldwide web requires users to select multiple answers from a given list, this can be implemented in several ways. This paper discusses an empirical study with participants, where two interface elements for choosing multiple answers (checkboxes and list boxes) were compared. Results showed that participants chose the same amount of options in both conditions but were faster and more satisfied using checkboxes. The time differences disappeared after several trials, revealing a learning effect for the list box element. As a conclusion, it can be recommended that website developers and online researchers should use checkboxes instead of list boxes for their online forms and questionnaires to enhance usability and user satisfaction—at least for a smaller number of options.

Concurrency has been with us almost from the beginning of computing. Managing and programming for concurrency is a difficult problem and various solutions have been suggested over the years. Debates on message passing vs. remote procedure call, synchronous vs. asynchronous message passing, bounded vs. unbounded buffers, active vs. passive objects etc. still continue. No solution is entirely satisfactory. Concurrent programming usually depends heavily on the nature of the problem at hand and the architecture of the target machine.

An object-oriented programming framework for the parallel dynamic analysis of structures

Analytical modeling is applied to the automated design of application-specific superscalar processors. Using an analytical method bridges the gap between the size of the design space and the time required for detailed cycle-accurate simulations. The proposed design framework takes as inputs the design targets (upper bounds on execution time, area, and energy), design alternatives, and one or more application programs. The output is the set of out-of-order superscalar processors that are Pareto-optimal with respect to performance-energy-area. The core of the new design framework is made up of analytical performance and energy activity models, and an analytical model-based design optimization process.For a set of benchmark programs and a design space of 2000 designs, the design framework arrives at all performance-energy-area Pareto-optimal design points within 16 minutes on a 2 GHz Pentium-4. In contrast, it is estimated that a naive cycle-accurate simulation-based exhaustive search would require at least two months to arrive at the Pareto-optimal design points for the same design space.

For many software engineers, object-oriented frameworks represent the highest level of achievement in extensible design. The framework designers become experts in a specific application domain and design cooperating classes that impose specific responsibilities and collaborations for those seeking to extend the framework. In short, once a framework matures, it has complicated usage patterns that must be followed otherwise nothing works. Turning a framework into a software product line is challenging because of the difficulty in coding these complex behaviors and enabling the configuration of product line members using the framework. We propose to support this migration process by showing how to design a repository of modular units to synthesize member applications compositionally. These units are formalized using combinatory logic synthesis, a type-based approach to component-oriented synthesis. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with a Java-based product line for which we can automatically synthesize member applications.

Nowadays, touchable displays are widely used in most embedded systems, including mobile phones and other hand-held devices. Although interactive user interfaces are intuitively required for these systems, most of interactive graphical user interface implementations usually need lots of system resources. For low-tier embedded systems, we have presented that the text-based user interfaces are more suitable, as shown in our previous works. In this paper, we present an object-oriented approach to provide a full-scale text-based user interface scheme, especially on the low-tier embedded systems. Our application user interface implementation is very simple and intuitive, with few amount of computing resource. It naturally supports multiple overlapping windows, pop-up menus, pull-down menus, dialog boxes, and other user interface components, with graceful object-oriented application programming interfaces. We also provide large size text output for emphasis purposes. All the systems are now available as a software library, and can be used for wide range of applications.

This paper presents the challenges met in the development of a new framework for multiaxis and multirobot control. The increasing demand for multirobot collaboration and robotic assistance, both in industry and service applications, has raised the level of interactions between robots and humans in a shared environment with real-time constraints. Some scientific and technological issues need to be unlocked to ensure safe human–robot interactions: to guarantee the response time during the robot perception–action process, to cope with dynamic interactions with the robot environment, to secure the collaborations between several machines and humans, and to improve the integration of the robots at home and in open zones of production lines. The specifications of a new hardware and software framework are set with respect to these observations. The framework will meet complex research and industrial issues for the future of multiaxis and multirobot control. Before introducing our approach, a brief survey of existing frameworks and robotic middleware is given. The foundations of our approach are based on the following requirements: the framework must be real time, transferable, maintainable, and multimanufacturer. The framework design has also to guarantee the robustness of the machine interactions in a dynamic and collaborative environment. To evaluate the feasibility of our design strategy and assess its performance, we have developed mechatronic devices with a high level of human–machine collaboration. This paper outlines two robotic applications which require multirobot real-time synchronization and are based on the proposed framework. A temporal analysis demonstrates its robustness for multiaxis and multirobot control. Note to Practitioners —This paper was motivated by the problem of proposing a transferable framework dedicated to real-time multiaxis and multirobot control. Most of the existing middleware solutions do not unify accesses to the axis level and to the robot control level with a common programming approach and with real-time capability. This is a key problem for achieving multirobot synchronization and reaction times compatible with dynamic collaboration. Our framework is based on open robotics and object-oriented programming and implements the industrial standards for motion control. Multirobots control experiments with a high number of synchronized axis and heterogeneous hardware demonstrate the efficiency of the approach.

Chapter 3 - Frameworks and Object-Oriented Programming

A program is composed of commands that run within a computer or an electronic circuit. Programming is a mathematical methodology to write a program and to encode the algorithm into a notation. It can be classified into two groups such as system and application programming. System programming is a branch of the general programming that is composed of low-level instructions which are used to operate and handle computer hardware. Application programming is considered as the improved version of the computer programs that can perform specific tasks. One of the application programming types is the object-oriented programming (OOP) which is about how information is represented in human mind. OOP is useful to provide easy modeling in design and developing real entities. This approach is aimed to model the entities and the relationships existing between them. OOP enables to define the required classes to create the objects and to apply modifications on them. The inherent properties of OOP are modularity, extensibility, and reusability. This chapter provides a substantial survey of OOP.

Developing both graphical and command-line user interfaces for neuroimaging algorithms requires considerable effort. Neuroimaging algorithms can meet their potential only if they can be easily and frequently used by their intended users. Deployment of a large suite of such algorithms on multiple platforms requires consistency of user interface controls, consistent results across various platforms and thorough testing. We present the design and implementation of a novel object-oriented framework that allows for rapid development of complex image analysis algorithms with many reusable components and the ability to easily add graphical user interface controls. Our framework also allows for simplified yet robust nightly testing of the algorithms to ensure stability and cross platform interoperability. All of the functionality is encapsulated into a software object requiring no separate source code for user interfaces, testing or deployment. This formulation makes our framework ideal for developing novel, stable and easy-to-use algorithms for medical image analysis and computer assisted interventions. The framework has been both deployed at Yale and released for public use in the open source multi-platform image analysis software--BioImage Suite (bioimagesuite.org).

Recently, one can recognize an increased awareness in the object-oriented research community with respect to the role of software architectures. Examples of this can, among others, be found in object-oriented frameworks and design patterns. In the call for papers for the workshop, the following topics were identified where software architecture, patterns and frameworks should be studied in more detail: Building OO software architectures: How can design patterns, frameworks and components be included in the traditional object-oriented analysis and design? How are architecture constraints processed to build OO software architectures? Which techniques can help to build an OO architecture that supports reuse and is scalable? Language role in architecture: What is the role of a particular object-oriented language when designing an architecture? Architecture documentation: It has been suggested that design patterns can be used to document the design and rationale of an object-oriented architecture. How well does this work in practice? OO architectural styles: What is the relation between the architectural styles of Garlan and Shaw and OO design? Composition of architectures: Since object-oriented frameworks are an accepted technology within the software industry, the composition of two or more frameworks in an application occurs increasingly often. The composition may be far from trivial and the problems that may appear as well as solutions should be investigated.

I+: A multiparadigm language for object-oriented declarative programming

The object-oriented programming is widely used in different fields of finite element analysis (FEA). The commonly used object-oriented codes were almost written by C++. Due to the inability to automatically manage memory and the lack of gigantic standard library and a third-party library for C++, building matrix classes are needed and a strong programming ability for program developers is also necessary. The conventional FEM method still has many disadvantages such as poor accuracy, hard stiffness matrix, mesh dependence and lack of upper bound solution. The smoothed FEM (S-FEM) method proposed by Liu et al. can efficiently overcome these disadvantages and is therefore widely used in FEA. In this work, the elastic-plastic CS-FEM method is extended and implemented using Python programming based on the framework proposed [H. Li and Y. Xiao, Implementation and numerical simulation on object-oriented elastic-plastic finite element method based on Python, J. Syst. Simul. 36(5) (2024) 1107–1117] The resulting object-oriented elastic-plastic CS-FEM framework is then applied to FEA of elastic-plastic mechanics problems. The correctness of the resulting framework and the high computational accuracy and good mesh adaptability of CS-FEM models have been verified by comparing the corresponding results with an analytical solution or ABAQUS results. The object-oriented elastic-plastic CS-FEM framework provides a more efficient and adaptable approach to FEA, and can also overcome many limitations of the conventional FEM method and C++ programming. The use of Python and the CS-FEM method offers improved computational accuracy, mesh adaptability and development efficiency, and this will make it a valuable tool for solving practical problems in mechanics and engineering.

An object-oriented simulation framework for individual-based simulations (OSIRIS): Daphnia population dynamics as an example

The success of middleware platforms is leading to a number of challenges as the motivation grows to deploy middleware in ever more demanding application domains. This paper therefore introduces a flexible, object-oriented communications framework, called BOSSA NOVA, which can be integrated into middleware platforms to better support domains such as soft real-time, multimedia, and adaptive mobile systems. In particular, BOSSA NOVA aims at providing flexibility in terms of protocol structure and composition, protocol granularity, and concurrency/multiplexing structure. The use of reflective interfaces explicitly facilitates management and dynamic reconfiguration as well as QoS specification and negotiation together with associated resource management in protocol graphs. QoS-negotiation protocols and resource-management policies, however, in common with most areas of the framework, are open and non-prescribed, although basic protocols and reusable base functionality are readily provided. For ease of use, BOSSA NOVA relies on only a small set of simple and consistently used abstractions, which allow for efficient implementations.