DEVELOPING PORTABLE SOFTWARE

Proposed Textbook Outline

Jim Mooney
Dept. of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
West Virginia University

Copyright 1995 -2000- All Rights Reserved

• PART I: FOUNDATIONS
• 1. INTRODUCTION
  1. What is the Problem?
     1. Why port software?
     2. Who should care?
     3. Costs and benefits
     4. Portability activities
     5. Historical notes
  2. Portability Concepts
     1. Definition
     2. Characterizing the target
     3. Transportation and adaptation
     4. What can we Port?
     5. Levels of Portability
     6. Related Concepts
     7. Non-technical constraints
     8. Do we always want identical behavior?
  3. Development Strategies
     1. Thinking portable
     2. Isolating dependencies
     3. Following programming disciplines
     4. Controlling interfaces
  4. Overview of the text
• 2. PORTABILITY MODELS
  1. The use of models
  2. Interface models
     1. Static interface model
     2. evolution over time
  3. Activity models
     1. The porting process
  4. Software models
     1. The 4C model
     2. Classification
• 3. THE ROLE OF STANDARDS
  1. What is a Standard?
  2. Formal Standards
     1. The standards development process
     2. Official standards organizations
     3. Consortia
     4. Examples
  3. De Facto Standards
     1. What are they?
     2. Examples
  4. Usefulness and limitations
• PART II: PROBLEMS AND STRATEGIES
• 4. TRANSPORTATION ISSUES
  1. Movement and distribution
  2. Media compatibility
  3. Data translation
• 5. STRATEGIES FOR ADAPTATION
  1. Conquering the interfaces
  2. Language-based strategies
  3. Standard and portable libraries
  4. Dealing with the operating system
  5. Dealing with the architecture
  6. "Open" Systems
  7. Cultural adaptation
• 6. STANDARD LANGUAGES
  1. The promise of Standard Languages
  2. Contributions and limitations
  3. The Ada Language
  4. The C Language
  5. The C++ Language
  6. The Pascal Language
  7. The FORTRAN Language
  8. The COBOL Language
  9. Other languages
• 7. OTHER LANGUAGE-BASED STRATEGIES
  1. Preprocessors
  2. Source-to-source translation
  3. Intermediate-level porting
  4. Porting the compiler
• 8. STANDARD AND PORTABLE LIBRARIES
  1. Language-based libraries
  2. Numerical libraries
  3. System Libraries
  4. Other libraries
• 9. OPERATING SYSTEM STRATEGIES
  1. What are the problems?
  2. Portable operating systems
  3. Standard APIs
  4. Bridging the gap
  5. File System and naming issues
• 10. ARCHITECTURE STRATEGIES
  1. Standard Architectures
  2. Generic Architectures
• PART III: PORTABLE SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
• 11. THE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
  1. Portability and the Software Process
  2. Specification
  3. Design
  4. Implementation
  5. Testing and Debugging
  6. Documentation
  7. Maintenance
• 12. PORTABILITY TOOLS
  1. Exploiting general tools
  2. Tools for porting
  3. Tools for portable design
  4. Analysis tools
  5. Other tools
• 13. FORMAL METHODS
  1. Formal specification
  2. Description and Classification
  3. Measuring portability
     1. Process metrics
     2. Product metrics
     3. Using the metrics
  4. Verification
     1. Preserving correctness when porting
     2. Efficient reverification
  5. Timing issues
     1. Preserving timing properties
• 14. PORTABILITY AND REUSE
  1. Portability as a type of reuse
  2. Essential differences
  3. Common issues and problems
  4. Management issues
• PART IV: SPECIAL TOPICS
• 15. NON-TECHNICAL PROBLEMS
  1. Intellectual property protection
  2. Commercial constraints
  3. National and political barriers
  4. Other problems
• 16. PORTING LEGACY SOFTWARE
  1. Deciding whether to port
  2. Selecting a Strategy
  3. Reverse Engineering
  4. Improving Portability
• 17. USER INTERFACES AND CULTURAL ISSUES
  1. The concept of cultural adaptation
  2. Porting across user interfaces
  3. Adapting for user experience
  4. Internationalization
  5. Serving economically disadvantaged users
• 18. DISTRIBUTED AND PARALLEL SOFTWARE
  1. Portability in distributed environments
  2. Portability for parallel software
  3. Shared-memory approaches
  4. Message passing approaches
  5. Algorithm Adaptation
• 19. REAL-TIME SOFTWARE
  1. The challenge of real-time portability
  2. Types of real-time software
  3. Some emerging approaches
• 20. THE PORTABILITY INFRASTRUCTURE
  1. Portable platform design
  2. Standards development
  3. Tool development
• 21. CASE STUDIES
  1. Some research examples
  2. Some commercial applications
  3. Large-scale projects
• 22. CONCLUSION
  1. Summary of guidelines
  2. The future of portability
• APPENDICES
• A. PORTABILITY PROJECTS
• B. SOFTWARE INTERFACE STANDARDS
• C. PORTABILITY RESOURCES