. Data integration is a key issue for any integrated set of software tools where each tool has its own data structures (at least on the conceptual level), but where we have many interdependencies between these private data structures. A typical CASE environment, for instance, offers tools for the manipulation of requirements and software design documents and provides more or less sophisticated assistance for keeping these documents in a consistent state. Up to now almost all of these data consistency observing or preserving integration tools are hand-crafted due to the lack of generic implementation frameworks and the absence of adequate specification formalisms. Triple graph grammars, a proper superset of pair grammars, are intended to fill this gap and to support the specification of interdependencies between graph-like data structures on a very high level. Furthermore, they form a solid fundament of a new machinery for the production of batch-oriented as well as incrementally workin...

Mobile devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants, have gained wide-spread popularity. These devices will increasingly be networked, thus enabling the construction of distributed applications that have to adapt to changes in context, such as variations in network bandwidth, battery power, connectivity, reachability of services and hosts, and so on. In this paper we describe CARISMA, a mobile computing middleware which exploits the principle of reflection to enhance the construction of adaptive and context-aware mobile applications. The middleware provides software engineers with primitives to describe how context changes should be handled using policies. These policies may conflict. We classify the di#erent types of conflicts that may arise in mobile computing and argue that conflicts cannot be resolved statically at the time applications are designed, but, rather, need to be resolved at execution time. We demonstrate a method by which policy conflicts can be handled; this method uses a micro-economic approach that relies on a particular type of sealed-bid auction. We describe how this method is implemented in the CARISMA middleware architecture, and sketch a distributed context-aware application for mobile devices to illustrate how the method works in practise. We show, by way of a systematic performance evaluation, that conflict resolution does not imply undue overheads, before comparing our research to related work and concluding the paper.

We present an approach for the generation of components for a software renovation factory. These components are generated from a context-free grammar definition that recognizes the code that has to be renovated. We generate analysis and transformation components that can be instantiated with a specific transformation or analysis task. We apply our approach to COBOL and we discuss the construction of realistic software renovation components using our approach.

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Graph-like data structures and rule-based systems play an important role within many branches of computer science. Nevertheless, their symbiosis in the form of graph rewriting systems or graph grammars are not yet popular among software engineers. This is a consequence of the fact that graph grammar tools were not available until recently and of the lack of knowledge about how to use graph grammars for software development purposes. "Graph grammar engineering" is a first attempt to establish a new graph and rule centered methodology for the development of information system components. Having its roots in the late 80's it gradually evolved from a "paper and pencil" specification formalism to a tool-assisted specification and rapid prototyping approach.

The subject of this paper is the description of a process-centered software development environment called MERLIN which monitors and guides teams of software developers and managers in producing software objects. Software objects (or objects for short) include all sorts of documents like the requirements analysis, design, code, user manuals, contracts etc. For each user, MERLIN automatically displays a specific working context which contains information like objects, their relations, their current development state, and corresponding tools. This information is filtered according to the (access) rights and duties a particular user has in a particular project, i.e. the working context depends on the user's role (e.g. programmer, designer, manager). Internally, the computation of the information to be contained in a working context, is based on a rule-like definition of a software process and a flexible interpretation mechanism to enact such a process definition.The main feature of the in...

Various forms of programmed graph replacement systems as extensions of contextsensitive graph replacement systems have been proposed until today. They differ considerably with respect to their underlying graph models, the supported forms of graph replacement rules, and offered rule regulation mechanisms. Some of them have additional constructs for the definition of graph schemata, derived graph properties, and so forth. It is rather difficult to develop precise and compact descriptions of programmed graph replacement systems, a necessary prerequisite for any attempt to compare their properties in detail. Programmed Logic-based Structure Replacement (PLSR) systems are a kind of intermediate definition language for this purpose. They treat specific graph classes as sets of predicate logic formulas with certain properties, so-called structures. Their rules preserve the consistency of manipulated structures and use nonmonotonic reasoning for checking needed preand postconditions. So-called Basic Control Flow (BCF) expressions together with an underlying fixpoint theory provide needed means for programming with rules. This chapter introduces first the basic framework of PLSR systems and studies afterwards the essential properties of context-sensitive graph replacement approaches themselves as well as popular rule regulation mechanisms.

Graphs are a popular data structure, and graph-manipulation programs are common. Graph manipulations can be cleanly, compactly, and explicitly described using graph-rewriting notation. However, when a software developer is persuaded to try graph rewriting, several problems commonly arise. Primarily, it is difficult for a newcomer to develop a feel for how computations are expressed via graph rewriting. Also, graph-rewriting is not convenient for solving all aspects of a problem: better mechanisms are needed for interfacing graph rewriting with other styles of computation.

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We argue that, despite a substantial number of proposed and existing new database systems, a suitable database system for software development environments and especially process-centred environments does not yet exist. We do so by reviewing and refining the requirements for such systems in detail based on a number of examples. We then sketch a number of available and archetypical database systems and indicate why they do not meet these requirements. 1 This report has been published in: I. Sommerville and M. Paul, editors, Software Engineering ESEC '93 --- Proc. of the 4 th European Software Engineering Conference, Garmisch Partenkirchen, Germany, volume 717 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 145--162, Springer 1993. 1 Introduction Software development environments (SDEs) include tools which support most of the software life-cycle phases, i.e. construction and analysis of the corresponding documents and document interdependencies. Sophisticated integrated environments en...