Issues Encountered in Building a Flexible Lessons from the Arcadia Project

This paper presents some of the more signicant technical lessons that the Arcadia project has learned about developing eective s o f t ware development e n vi-ronments. The principal components of the Arcadia-1 architecture are capabilities for process denition and execution, object management, user interface development and management, measurement and evaluation, language processing, and analysis and testing. In s i-multaneously and cooperatively developing solutions in these areas we l e a rned several key lessons. Among them: the need to combine and apply heterogenous componen-try, m ultiple techniques for developing components, the pervasive need for rich t ype models, the need for supporting dynamism (and at what granularity), the role and value of concurrency, a nd the role and various forms of event-based control integration mechanisms. These lessons are explored in the paper.