Thu May 8, 2008, 4:15-5:30, 3400 Boelter Hall

Network Serviced Programming:
Can we Cure the Curse of Compatibility?

Gilad Bracha
Cadence Design Systems

The greatest challenge facing software developers today is not how to add 
new features; it is how to change or remove existing ones.  In a widely 
distributed software platform, such as Java or Windows, any change, even 
a seemingly innocuous bug fix, is an incompatibility.  Someone is relying 
on the existing behavior, however unintentional.  Consequently, software 
systems can only grow, accreting new features without the ability to 
"clean house".

Network-serviced programming seeks to leverage today's global connectivity 
so that all uses of a software component can be tracked and migrated as 
the component evolves, allowing it to shed excess features and misfeatures 
on an ongoing basis.

The immediate benefits of Network-serviced programming are more pragmatic: 
the ability to combine the advantages of traditional client applications 
and web services.  In this talk, we introduce the key ideas of 
Network-serviced programming, starting with basics and moving on to the 
vision of a world without software releases.

About the speaker:  Gilad Bracha is a Distinguished Engineer at 
Cadence Design Systems.  Previously, he was a Computational Theologist 
and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems.  He is co-author of the 
Java Language Specification, and a researcher in the area of 
object-oriented programming languages.  Prior to joining Sun, he worked 
on Strongtalk, the Animorphic Smalltalk System.  He received his B.Sc in 
Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel 
and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah.

Host: Todd Millstein