This project is focused on the needs of the modern software developer, operating in diverse heterogeneous environments, building scalable, distributed and networked application suites and software services. The project will innovate and devise a set of software productivity tools to significantly boost developer productivity, increasing the quality and reliability of applications under construction. These tools will address the needs of the general distributed application developer and also the requirements associated with the development of next generation telecommunications services. The requirements and opportunities for this new technology arise from major trends in software development paradigms over the past ten years and in the projected convergence of the Internet technologies with telecommunications infrastructure, particularly mobile wireless services.

Four key developments can be identified:

• Increasing complexity in the structure of distributed application development & deployment;
• Emergence of open extensible Integrated Development Environments (IDEs);
• The widespread adoption of portable code paradigms, most notably in the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) deployments;
• Migration of IP based software services, developed using IDE + Virtual Machine technology, to wireless LAN (WiFi) and mobile telephony (GPRS & 3G) networks.

Enterprise Ireland