Tutorials -- Half Day/Thursday PM

Typical object-oriented development techniques assume target systems have relatively large amounts of RAM available to the user. Developers working with tight memory requirements also need the flexibility and encapsulation which OO can provide, but cannot afford to produce systems with large memory requirements. This tutorial will describe how you can use OO techniques in a memory-constrained environment. Using an approach based on design patterns and practical examples, this tutorial will explore some of the most important techniques that successful designers use in object oriented systems for small memory machines.

This tutorial will help participants manage object oriented development in limited-memory environments. The tutorial will present specialized design patterns, including patterns for preparing and managing memory budgets, designing and allocating object structures, transparently exploiting auxiliary storage, and tailoring user interfaces for small machines. The patterns will be illustrated with case studies to provide experience for the participants in designing their own solutions.

Attendee Background: We expect this tutorial will be useful to software developers with a year's experience using an O-O programming language, technically experienced team leaders managing teams working on memory-limited systems, and experience of working with memory-limited systems will be helpful but not essential.

Charles Weir has more than fifteen years' experience with software development and object-oriented techniques. Charles was software architect for the Web Browser development for the Psion Series 5 palmtop computer. Charles has taught many courses on Object-Oriented design and Implementation, has led several active-learning sessions at the UK Object Technology series of conferences.

Dr. James Noble is a Research Fellow at the Microsoft Research Institute at Macquarie University, Sydney. He established the Sydney Patterns Group, the first patterns group in the Southern Hemisphere. James and Charles are collaborating on a book "Patterns for Small Machines" that describes patterns for memory-constrained systems, to be published by Addison-Wesley in 1999.