Abstractions for event-driven design

In areas such as GUI programming the design style known as event-driven or publish-subscribe is often attractive as a replacement for standard control structures. It provides more flexibility by decoupling cause and effect. Apart from the Observer pattern, a useful but limited technique, there is no generally accepted view of what the proper OO abstractions should be. The talk describes software architecture principles for designing event-driven systems, with the usual goals of extendibility, reusability and reliability.

Warnings:

  1. The presentation is fairly dependent on Eiffel mechanisms.
  2. Although we think it has practical and pedagogical value, the material is not particularly advanced.

References:
[1] B. Meyer, chapter 20 of “Touch of Class”, draft of textbook
available at http://touch.ethz.ch.

[2] “The Power of Abstraction, Reuse and Simplicity: An
Object-Oriented Library for Event-Driven Design”, in From
Object-Orientation to Formal
Methods: Essays in Memory of Ole-Johan Dahl, eds. Olaf Owe, Stein
Krogdahl, Tom Lyche, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2635,
Springer-Verlag, 2004, pages 236-271, available at
http://se.ethz.ch/~meyer/publications/lncs/events.pdf.

Speaker Details

Dr. Bertrand Meyer is professor of software engineering at ETH Zurich and Chief Architect of Eiffel Software. He is the author of several books including “Object-Oriented Software Construction” and “Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages.”

Date:
Speakers:
Bertrand Meyer
Affiliation:
ETH Zurich and Eiffel Software