Marcel Taeumel's Books

Towards version control in object-based systems

By: Jakob Reschke,Marcel Taeumel,Tobias Pape,Fabio Niephaus,Robert Hirschfeld

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Towards version control in object-based systems

By: Jakob Reschke,Marcel Taeumel,Tobias Pape,Fabio Niephaus,Robert Hirschfeld

Version control is a widely used practice among software developers. It reduces the risk of changing their software and allows them to manage different configurations and to collaborate with others more efficiently. This is amplified by code sharing platforms such as GitHub or Bitbucket. Most version control systems track files (e.g., Git, Mercurial, and Subversion do), but some programming environments do not operate on files, but on objects instead (many Smalltalk implementations do). Users of such environments want to use version control for their objects anyway. Specialized version control systems, such as the ones available for Smalltalk systems (e.g., ENVY/Developer and Monticello), focus on a small subset of objects that can be versioned. Most of these systems concentrate on the tracking of methods, classes, and configurations of these. Other user-defined and user-built objects are either not eligible for version control at all, tracking them involves complicated workarounds, or a fixed, domain-unspecific serialization format is used that does not equally suit all kinds of objects. Moreover, these version control systems that are specific to a programming environment require their own code sharing platforms;popular, well-established platforms for file-based version control systems cannot be used or adapter solutions need to be implemented and maintained. To improve the situation for version control of arbitrary objects, a framework for tracking, converting, and storing of objects is presented in this report. It allows editions of objects to be stored in an exchangeable, existing backend version control system. The platforms of the backend version control system can thus be reused. Users and objects have control over how objects are captured for the purpose of version control. Domain-specific requirements can be implemented. The storage format (i.e. the file format, when file-based backend version control systems are used) can also vary from one object to another. Different editions of objects can be compared and sets of changes can be applied to graphs of objects. A generic way for capturing and restoring that supports most kinds of objects is described. It models each object as a collection of slots. Thus, users can begin to track their objects without first having to implement version control supplements for their own kinds of objects. The proposed architecture is evaluated using a prototype implementation that can be used to track objects in Squeak/Smalltalk with Git. The prototype improves the suboptimal standing of user objects with respect to version control described above and also simplifies some version control tasks for classes and methods as well. It also raises new problems, which are discussed in this report as well.

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Page Count

106

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Universitätsverlag Potsdam

Published Date

ISBN 10

386956430X

ISBN 13

9783869564302

The Font Engineering Platform

Collabarative Font Creation in a Self-supporting Programming Environment

By: Taeumel, Marcel,Beckmann, Tom,Fister, Lasse,Hildebrand, Justus,Hirschfeld, Robert,Jaschek, Corinna,Krebs, Eva,Löser, Alexander,Pape, Tobias

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The Font Engineering Platform

Collabarative Font Creation in a Self-supporting Programming Environment

By: Taeumel, Marcel,Beckmann, Tom,Fister, Lasse,Hildebrand, Justus,Hirschfeld, Robert,Jaschek, Corinna,Krebs, Eva,Löser, Alexander,Pape, Tobias

Creating fonts is a complex task that requires expert knowledge in a variety of domains. Often, this knowledge is not held by a single person, but spread across a number of domain experts. A central concept needed for designing fonts is the glyph, an elemental symbol representing a readable character. Required domains include designing glyph shapes, engineering rules to combine glyphs for complex scripts and checking legibility. This process is most often iterative and requires communication in all directions. This report outlines a platform that aims to enhance the means of communication, describes our prototyping process, discusses complex font rendering and editing in a live environment and an approach to generate code based on a user’s live-edits. Die Erstellung von Schriften ist eine komplexe Aufgabe, die Expertenwissen aus einer Vielzahl von Bereichen erfordert. Oftmals liegt dieses Wissen nicht bei einer einzigen Person, sondern bei einer Reihe von Fachleuten. Ein zentrales Konzept für die Gestaltung von Schriften ist der Glyph, ein elementares Symbol, das ein einzelnes lesbares Zeichen darstellt. Zu den erforderlichen Domänen gehören das Entwerfen der Glyphenformen, technische Regeln zur Kombination von Glyphen für komplexe Skripte und das Prüfen der Lesbarkeit. Dieser Prozess ist meist iterativ und erfordert ständige Kommunikation zwischen den Experten. Dieser Bericht skizziert eine Plattform, die darauf abzielt, die Kommunikationswege zu verbessern, beschreibt unseren Prototyping-Prozess, diskutiert komplexe Schriftrendering und -bearbeitung in einer Echtzeitumgebung und einen Ansatz zur Generierung von Code basierend auf direkter Manipulation eines Nutzers.

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