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June 01, 1998
Overload 26 Editorial
Broadening
Over the past six months I've been encouraging you authors to present material which goes beyond C++ as a language. C++ is the language I use to codify my designs, but what's the language I use to express my design, and how do I translate that into code?
All mature development processes include design and documentation phases, and being able to communicate effectively is a key engineering skill. Richard Blundell has been producing an excellent tutorial series on the UML, which embodies many techniques for exploing, problem spaces and communicating solutions.
Along side this exploration of a modelling language we've had a number of articles which document the development experience of applying C++ in various application domains. The notion of 'Software Patterns' is a formalised way of recording some aspects of this software experience. This issue Francis begins a series of articles discussing the patterns presented in the Gamma, et. al. 'Design Patterns' book. There is a great scope of work that could be explored here. How might each pattern be implemented, improved upon, or combined? Are patterns even a worthwhile thing?
Overload is starting to cover various aspects of object oriented technology, but from C++'s own vantage point. There are complementary or competing technologies that we should consider. For example, issues that have occupied much of my time over the past few years are componentisation and distributed object technology.
The software development environment appears to be becoming more hetrogenious then homogenious. Enterprise software systems are constructed with a variety of software tools, languages, and even operating systems. Components attempt to define the common binary gulf between packages built in different languages. An article exploring COM/DCOM, CORBA, and perhaps even Java/RMI would be of great interest to myself, and perhaps others.
John Merrells
June 1998
Posted by John at 12:00 PM