• Our tools paper was accepted for ICSE 2011 (International Conference on Software Engineering)

  The title is: Evolve: Tool Support for Architecture Evolution

  Hawaii here we come! In the paper we discuss how Evolve unifies component design with the concepts of evolution from distributed version control. You can see the short movie we prepared here:

http://www.intrinsarc.com/movies/evolve.html

• The team edition is nearly in beta

  This has involved a huge amount of work, but it’s really close now. The team edition uses an advanced object database to allow multiple developers to collaborate on a single model. Huge models are supported gracefully. Look for this to be released sometime in March 2011.

We hope to start blogging a lot more in the new year. Stay tuned, there is much to say!

Andrew

The slides I used are here, although you will need MS Powerpoint to view them correctly (doesn’t work fully in OpenOffice for some reason):

• An architectural approach to extensible applications
• Advanced Topics

Thanks to the Uni for hosting this, and to Tomas and Petr for the kind invitation to speak. Several Netbeans engineers were able to attend; the questions they asked were very insightful, particularly those comparing Evolve strata to changesets in distributed version control.

Thanks also to Jaroslav Tulach, the Netbeans architect, for the discussions around Evolve and general software engineering over beers!

Please also note that the delete key now deletes the model elements also. If you require the old “delete view” command, please invoke this from the edit menu. We made this change because we found that people generally expected the deeper behaviour in usability tests.

Please try it out and send any feedback to info@intrinsarc.com

We have been working hard to get to this stage. Based on the slowing rate of bug reports, we are fairly confident of only needing another handful of further releases before our tentative go-live date of 1st November.

Evolve is a UML-based tool for creating, wiring up and executing components. It currently supports Java.

It is now in public beta, and we invite you to try it out.

http://intrinsarc.com/evolve/what-is-evolve

Have a look at the screenshots at:

http://intrinsarc.com/evolve/screenshots

“evolve is a more powerful and principled alternative to dependency injection”

This is a bold claim. We are going to be contentious at this point and just go ahead and list Evolve’s advantages. We will then follow up on a serious of blog posts that substantiate our claims. For those who require proof now, please download the software and work through the examples in the user manual.

a better way to connect objects

Evolve is based on a powerful component model with full connectors. This lets you wire up any structures you want, in a similar way to how an electronics designer wires chips up into a circuit board. No more messing around with “prototype” and “singleton” tags to construct complex components. No more problems making two instances refer to each other.

The use of connectors gives far more power than standard DI approaches. This is not conjecture – Evolve’s component model comes from years of deep academic research, and we will provide simple examples showing the difference in future posts.

explicit architecture

No more hiding architectures inside XML files or smattering them through your codebase as annotations. The full architecture of your application is visible as UML diagrams, and the code and architecture are always kept completely synchronized.

evolution support is built-in

Evolve is based on cutting-edge research into highly extensible systems. It offers a powerful way to graphically evolve a system. Many variants of an application can be held in one Evolve model, and any system you make in Evolve has the remarkable property that it can always be extended without destroying the original!

This support for evolution provides a more principled alternative to aspects, without many of their disadvantages.

easy handling of complexity

Evolve has been designed to handle large systems with ease. It can literally scale to thousands of components. Fine-grained or coarse-grained, Evolve handles them all. No more getting lost as your DI configuration grows too large.

The above just covers a fraction of Evolve and its extensive facilities. Stay tuned as we work to release the other parts!