Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	GR/J67611/01
Title:	DELIVERING THE BENEFITS OF PERSISTENCE TO SYSTEM CONSTRUCTION AND EXECUTION
Principal Investigator:	Morrison, Professor R
Other Investigators:	Munro, Dr D Connor, Professor R
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department:	Computer Science
Organisation:	University of St Andrews
Scheme:	Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts:	31 March 1995	Ends:	30 March 1998	Value (£):	249,176
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Software Engineering
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Related Grants:
Panel History:
Summary on Grant Application Form
The main objective of this project is to prove the persistent language technology resulting from previous research projects by its application in an integrated persistent software environment. The long-term objective is to provide technology whereby software quality in industrial strength persistent application systems may be increased. This requires two sub-components: a full understanding of the new mechanisms in a research context, and subsequently the transfer of the research technology into the industrial context.Progress:As the project has only just started, only a moderate amount of progress is to be expected. The first experiment in an integrated persistent programming environment will be an implementation of a version control and configuration management system, where particular facilities provided as part of the persistent context (notably referential integrity and type safety for long-lived data) are expected to allow a simpler, unified model to be presented to the software project managers and programmers. A background study of existing systems is in progress, encompassing Make, Vesta, SCCS, RCS, Cedar and Gandalf. The study is to determine in detail what facilities software engineers expect from such systems, but always with the goal of identifying any avoidable complexity caused by the necessity of working over untyped file systems, rather than in a persistent environment. For example, in a fully integrated persistent system, under some circumstances, it may not even be necessary for a conceptual distinction to be made between source and executable forms of the same program. Concurrently, work has also started on an implementation of the version windowing system, on the basis of which a configuration management system is expected to operate within the persistent environment.
Key Findings
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Potential use in non-academic contexts
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Further Information:
Organisation Website:	http://www.st-and.ac.uk