Chicory: A Rapid Application Development Environment for Java^TM

NEW! Download Chicory for JAVA 2(tm)

Chicory^TM is an Integrated Software Application Development Environment that supports the entire software application development lifecycle. The software application development cycle encompasses not only the traditional software lifecycle comprised of requirements elicitation, specification, analysis and design, coding (which includes tools for visual debugging, cross-referencing tools, editors, object browsers, profilers, static analyzers, lightweight program databases, and other tools), automatic test generation maintainence and reengineering support, and other important features needed for software project management (such as configuration control, common project visibility, group conferencing tools, and team-wide information sharing).

In addition, Chicory supports application development by providing tools for creating, populating, and querying databases and web servers, and will, in the future, provide support for computer telephony integration (CTI), and other commonly used application infrastructures. Furthermore, Chicory will also support software development by cross-functional teams by providing a collaborative infrastructure (including configuration and version control, common project visibility and information sharing in a distributed enterprise, and conferencing) for teams, thereby facilitating concurrent engineering of software artifacts.

Chicory is a language-based (in this case the specific language is Java) environment, which means the various tools that constituite the Chicory environment are Java-aware. For example, the Chicory editor will be aware of the Java language syntax, the various packages, etc., and the Chicory object modeller will know about classes, visibility rules, and inheritance conventions of the Java language.

Chicory will not only ease navigation between the various tools and tasks but will also allow these tools to be potentially downloaded on demand to work within clients, such as network computers, through network-based distribution channels, such as Castanet^TM

Chicory is a visual application development environment for rapidly creating client-server Java applications. It enhances programmer productivity by insulating the application developer from unnecessary programming details. Chicory automatically generates extremely tight Java code using sophisticated code-generation algorithms.

The design philosophy behind Chicory is to support multi-paradigmatic programming using components and component frameworks. It not only supports visual programming metaphors to assemble applications using components but also provides frameworks and their application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable the application programmer to customize the framework to suit his/her application.

Chicory currently supports the construction of three-tier client-server architectures using the JDBC^TM mechanism. In the near future Chicory will support distributed interoperable architectures, such as CORBA and DCOM, which will provide middleware services and ensure architectural scalability. In addition, Chicory will support component assembly and component-level software reuse by supporting the JavaBeans component framework. Furthermore, in the forthcoming versions, Chicory will support user-defined components to be imported into the Chicory framework and its palette. This feature will allow application developers not only to use third-party components in their applications but also to use the visual metaphors provided by Chicory to interact with their own components.



(Current Capabilities of Chicory) (Forthcoming Capabilities of Chicory)

Chicory is entirely written in Java, thereby making it portable to any platform supporting Java. In the near future, Chicory will be available for Sun Solaris^TM, OS/2^TM, MacOS ^TM, Linux, AIX ^TM and other platforms supporting Java.

This version of Chicory was developed by the Concurrent Engineering Research Center at West Virginia University. Future versions of Chicory are being commercialized by CyberMarche Inc of Morgantown, which has obtained the licenses from West Virginia University.

We are releasing an alpha version of Chicory (Alpha 1.0) with limited functionality to get user feedback as well to get users involved in the early design stages.

Please send bugs and other inconsistencies, as well as have technical questions, comments, or criticisms regarding the installation or use of Chicory to chicory@cerc.wvu.edu.

NEW! Download Chicory for JAVA 2(tm)


For additional information, contact:

Dr. Srinivas Kankanahalli or Dr. Y. V. Ramana Reddy

Concurrent Engineering Research Center

Email: chicory@cerc.wvu.edu




Chicory is a trademark of CyberMarche. Java, JavaBeans, JDBC, and Solaris are trademarks of Sun MicroSystems. Windows NT is a trademark of Microsoft; OS/2 and AIX are trademarks of IBM. MacOS is a trademark of Apple Computers. Castanet is a trademark of Marimba.