An indispensable resource for anyone working with Eiffel, this up-to-date guide provides full coverage of the most recent version of the language, focusing on Eiffel's practical use in the development of large, mission-critical software systems.
In addition to a comprehensive description of Eiffel's syntax and semantics, you will find in-depth information on style guides, analysis and design, design patterns, and validation and testing. Descriptions and comparisons of available compilers and libraries will help you decide which Eiffel tools best fit your development needs. The book even includes an Eiffel resource guide.
The book's most notable feature is its three large-scale case studies that demonstrate Eiffel in action, illustrating implementation techniques and showcasing Eiffel's power and effectiveness in three different realms: the MIS world, the embedded systems/telecommunications world, and the numeric world.
This is a book on software engineering the Eiffel way.
Born in Dijon (France), Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923) first worked as an engineer for a railroad construction company before starting an office dedicated to the study of metallic construction.Using light steel modular structures instead of the usual design with cast iron, Eiffel built tall infrastructures featuring very good aerodynamic resistance. He built several viaducts, most notably at Bordeaux (1858) and Gabarit (1884). He also created the framework of the Bon Marche department store (1876) in Paris. He oversaw several projects in Austria, Switzerland, Hungary (Pest Railway Station, 1876), and Portugal (the Maria-Pia Bridge near Porto, 1877).
His most famous structures were the framework of Bartholdi's Liberty Statue in New York and the 300-meter Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 universal exposition in Paris. These two world-famous landmarks were also technological marvels for that time. They paved the way for the new domain of industrial architecture. After 1890, Eiffel resigned from his business to concentrate on aerodynamic studies from the top of the Eiffel Tower. Today, more than one century after their construction, most of Eiffel's buildings are still standing and open for business.
In the software engineering domain, Eiffel is also the name of an object-oriented language that emphasizes the design and construction of high-quality software by assembling reusable software components, called classes, that serve as templates to make objects. Beyond classes (on which modularity is based), Eiffel offers multiple inheritance, polymorphism, static typing and dynamic binding, genericity, garbage collection, a disciplined exception mechanism, and systematic use of assertions to improve software correctness in the context of programming by contract.
Software engineering encompasses many more features than those offered by a computer language. Computer languages are just tools that software engineers can use (or misuse) within a larger context. The Eiffel language is a tool that has been specially designed in the context of software engineering. This book describes the tool, and provides clues on how to use it.
Chapter 1 is an introduction to the object-oriented approach within the context of software engineering. The main body of the book is then divided into two parts.
The first part of this book presents the language itself. Chapter 2 presents the basic (procedural) elements of the language: what an Eiffel program is, what the instruction set is, and how to declare and use entities (variables) and routines. Chapter 3 introduces the concepts underlying the object-oriented approach: modularity, inheritance, and dynamic binding, and illustrates them in a small case study from the management information system domain. Eiffel programs do not exist in a void, so Chapter 4 brings in environment matters: system configuration, interfacing with external software, and garbage collection. Chapter 5 closes the Eiffel presentation with more advanced issues involving exception handling, repeated inheritance, typing problems, and parallelism.
The second part of this book addresses some Eiffel software development issues. In Chapter 6, we outline how an object-oriented software engineering process may make the best use of Eiffel, concentrating on specific guidelines to facilitate the translation of object-oriented analysis and design to a maintainable Eiffel implementation. This process is illustrated by a rather large case study from the telecommunications domain. As a logical continuation of this study, Chapter 7 addresses verification and validation (V&V) issues of Eiffel software systems built in a software engineering context. Building reusable libraries is discussed in Chapter 8, which presents three competing Eiffel data structure libraries. Finally, Chapter 9 shows how Eiffel can be used as an enabling technology to master a very complex problem: the building of a parallel linear algebra library that allows an applications programmer to use distributed computing systems in a transparent way.
If you get lost at some point in terms of the Eiffel-related vocabulary, there is a short glossary given in Appendix A. An Eiffel syntax summary is presented in Appendix B, and a list of contacts closes this book (Appendix C).
AcknowledgmentsThis book would not exist in its present form without Bertrand Meyer (Interactive Software Engineering, Inc. ISE), the designer of the Eiffel language. Rock Howard (Tower Technology Corp.) and Michael Schweitzer (SiG Computer Gmbh) also helped me by providing some input on their Eiffel products (compilers and libraries).
I would also like to thank the countless people involved in enlightening discussions on the comp.lang.eiffel Internet newsgroup, and particularly Richard Bielak, Roger Browne, Hank Etlinger, Jacob Gore, James McKim, Jean-Jacques Moreau, Erwan Moysan, and Michel Train, who read early versions of this book and gave me a lot of feedback as well as many pertinent suggestions.
My colleagues at Irisa deserve credit for relieving me of a share of my everyday workload, thus allowing me to complete this book in a reasonable amount of time. I have a special debt toward F. Guidec, who did most of the Paladin library design, and F. Guerber, who was the main contributor on the switched multimegabits data service (SMDS) project.
Finally I would like to thank my editorial contact, Katie Duffy, for her constant support in making this book take shape.
Dr. Jean-Marc Jézéquel
Irisa/C.N.R.S.
University of Rennes
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