Welcome to the home page of the Software Systems Generator Research Group!

Software system generators are tools for assembling complex software from interchangeable, reusable components. We have developed GenVoca, a domain-independent model of software construction that defines systems as algebraic equations, where terms are components. GenVoca has been successfully applied to many domains including database management systems, avionics, and data structures. Our results have demonstrated GenVoca generators can substantially improve productivity and application run-time performance.

If this is your first visit and you have questions on what is the best place to start, take a look at Getting Started.

Related Web Pages: UTCS General


Members

Don Batory Professor
Angela Dappert Ph.D. Student
Guillermo Jimenez-Perez Ph.D. Student
Jeff Thomas Ph.D. Student
Lance Tokuda Ph.D. Student
Yannis Smaragdakis Ph.D. Student
Tao Wang Ph.D. Student
Gang Chen M.Sc. Student
 
Former Members
and Graduation Dates
K.T. Shepherd Graduated April 1997
Vivek Singhal Ph.D. August 1996
Dinesh Das Ph.D. May 1995
Millie Villarreal Ph.D. December 1994
Bart Geraci PostDoc September 1994
Marty Sirkin Ph.D. March 1994
Sankar Dasari M.Sc. May 1994

Overview (Getting Started)

Software components that are used by generators to build software systems are not typical software modules. Components encapsulate a feature of a domain that many systems of that domain may share. For this to be possible, components must encapsulate refinements of many different parts (e.g., classes) of a software system. Some of these refinements require the manipulation of metadata and reflective computations. Thus, it is likely that our basic approach goes beyond simple object-orientation to that of large-scale program transformations.

To get a feel for the basic issues involved and the breadth of GenVoca's applicability, I'd recommend the following papers for starters (and read them in this order):
 
If you are looking for specific results (improvement in productivity, performance) that can be delivered by generators, or the relationship of our work to design patterns, check out (in order):

For further information, please contact Don Batory (batory@cs.utexas.edu). Periodically, I release lecture notes for my tutorial on "Software System Generators, Architectures, and Reuse". When available, my April 1997 lecture notes are distributed as a tar file containing compressed postscript files.


Last modified: February 24, 1997

Don Batory (batory@cs.utexas.edu)