Informal Science Education II

High Level Design

EEL 5881 - Software Engineering I - Fall 2000

Modification history:
VersionDateWhoComment
Version 0.0August 15, 2000G.H. WaltonTemplate
Version 1.0November 4, 2000Michael Wales Initial Document

Miles Computer Engineering

Team Members:


Contents of this Document

High-Level Architecture

Design Issues


High-level Architecture:

High Level Design
   Structure V1.0


Design Issues:

Most of our focus in designing the code for this project will be on maintainability. Since it is the biggest part of the life cycle and can be the most difficult aspect of the project. We are going to focus on well documented code and well designed modules. We would like to avoid high coupling between our modules, but that is becoming a big challenge. I think the final product will have sets of classes that are highly coupled together, and there will be low coupling between the different sets of classes.

Another thing we considered when we started the project was it's portability. It was clear that would be creating a graphical program, so using C++ would cause the program to be only supported on the platform that the graphics library was for. Java was an easy choice because of it's portability, similarity to C++ (we have studied C++ mainly in computer engineering so far), and it's ease of use. This program can be run on any computer that is supported by the JRE (which includes PC, Macintosh, Sun, SGI, and even some PDA devices). The biggest downside from using Java is that the performance will be less than anything that is in native code. Performance is extemely poor on a 486DX-120 with our program, but if it was in native code we probably wouldn't even notice. Fortunately, most of the computers today that are still in use are many generations ahead of the 486 and the performance issue won't be as noticable.

Our biggest technical issue involved in this project will be trying to learn the Java GUI components. For Jeff and I, this is our first large programming assignment, and our first programming assignment involving a GUI interface. It's also been difficult to design the project because we are not familiar with the Java GUI components and how to interact with them.


Template created by G. Walton ( GWalton@mail.ucf.edu ) on October 8, 1999 and last modified on August 15, 2000

This page last modified by Michael Wales ( Mag7Rule@aol.com ) on November 6, 2000