Research Themes

Provided the ever growing amount of technology and expertise needed, and the ever increasing pressure to improve productivity, predictability and quality, there is a need to provide software engineering environments that really help software engineers in their tasks. But to really be helpful, an environment should have simultaneously a detailed knowledge of the task to support (it should be focused), and a global knowledge of the different tasks to support, over the complete life cycle (it should be wide scope). The solution we adopted is to develop a technology in which focused environment can be generated, based on a set of models, and in which wide scope environment can be produced by composition of more focused environments, based on model composition techniques. To be realistic, the approach not only must satisfy efficiency and scalability issues, but it must also be capable to reuse existing tools and environments, and to support the evolution of the tasks, the technology, the methods and the environment itself. The approach raises a number of new issues in different domains.

The evolution toward even more independence between the parts that constitute an application and even more dynamism calls for new programming models, new platforms and new tools. We have investigated, and contributed, to the emergence of the so called Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Most specifically we have implemented and influenced OSGi, which is the de facto industrial standard for dynamic applications and gateways.  This experience gives us the expertise to envision the future "ideal" platform for dynamic and autonomic applications. In parallel we are investigating how, above such a platform, can be designed and developed, based on high level models, the future demanding dynamic and distributed applications.