Plugin-based systems are an interesting approach to simple software systems. A successful example is the Eclipse IDE. One common problem in plugin-based systems is that concrete plugins do not know of each other. Therefore, they cannot use each other (directly). Thus, the organisation of content contributions by individual plugins is not a trivial tasks. An example are navigation structures (linear and hierarchic) which usually change through contributions by plugins - and depend on the "file system order" of the plugins.

We have already proposed ways to achieve self-organized linear and hierarchic structures of plugins, which can e.g. be used to organize menu/navigation structures. However, these results are more general. Furthermore, we are working on a self-organizing plugin architecture.

Another important part of our research related to Internet portals. A lot of frameworks exist to build such portals. However, all of them are huge and not as simple as possible. We are working to build a small event-based framework to allow for simple portal development - not much different from the development of desktop applications.

Team:

Former members:

Publications:

  1. Zhongda Zhao:
    Zur Erweiterung plugin- und serviceorientierter Architekturen.
    Master Thesis, Ulm University, February 2007.
  2. Boto Bako, Andreas Borchert, Norbert Heidenbluth, Johannes Mayer:
    Linearly Ordered Plugins through Self-Organization.
    In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems (ICAS 2006), IEEE Computer Society, 2006, p. 8 (7 pages).
  3. Boto Bako, Andreas Borchert, Norbert Heidenbluth, Johannes Mayer:
    Plugin-Based Systems with Self-Organized Hierarchical Presentation.
    In: Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Software Engineering Research and Practice (SERP 2006), CSREA Press, 2006, pp. 577-584.
  4. Sebastian Stoll:
    Ein ereignisbasiertes Framework für Internet-Portale - Analyse, Design und prototypische Implementierung.
    Diploma Thesis, Ulm University, December 2005.
  5. Boto Bako:
    Zur Konzeption erweiterbarer Anwendungen: Theorie und praktische Umsetzung.
    Diploma Thesis, Ulm University, October 2005.
  6. Guangya Su:
    Zur Abstraktion graphischer Benutzerschnittstellen: Konzeption und prototypische Implementierung.
    7. Bachelor Thesis, Ulm University, August 2005.
  7. Deniz Mahmutogullari:
    Zur Verallgemeinerung typischer Elemente von Internet Portalen -- Theorie und prototypische Implementierung.
    Diploma Thesis, Ulm University, February 2005.
  8. Norbert Heidenbluth:
    Zur Selbstorganisation und Personalisierung von Navigationsstrukturen in Internet-Portalen.
    Diploma Thesis, Ulm University, 2004.
  9. Johannes Mayer:
    On Quality Improvement of Scientific Software: Theory, Methods, and Application in the GeoStoch Development.
    Ph.D. Thesis, University of Ulm, June 2003.
  10. Johannes Mayer, Ingo Melzer, Franz Schweiggert:
    Lightweight Plug-in-Based Application Development.
    In: Proceedings of the Net.ObjectDays 2002, tranSIT GmbH, Ilmenau, Germany, October 2002, pp. 97-111. (ISBN 3-00-008419-3)
    Revised and extended version in: LNCS 2591, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2003, pp. 87-102. © Springer-Verlag
    [ps.gz]
  11. Johannes Mayer:
    Graphical User Interfaces Composed of Plug-ins.
    In: Proceedings of the Fourth European GCSE Young Researchers Workshop 2002, Fraunhofer IESE Technical Report No. 053.02/E, Kaiserslautern, Germany, October 2002, pp. 25-29.
    [ps.gz]