Knowledge Now 2

My diploma thesis project, focused on CORBA and distributed components. The thesis paper is available as a PDF download below, unfortunately only available in German.

The thesis was written in LaTeX and converted to a fully featured PDF document with pdfTeX, including links, page preview thumbnails, and a table of contents overview.

While working on this project, the following smaller spin-off tools were written:

• DDEExecute A command-line tool for issuing Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) commands to applications that support this Windows API.

• Launcher Starts the default Windows browser (as registered in the Windows registry) and sends control DDE commands to a running instance.

• JavaRT JavaRT stands for “Java Run Time” and simplifies the start-up of Java applications. The executable searches for installed Java VMs and launches the Java application with whichever VM it finds. For customization, JavaRT.exe can be renamed to MyApp.exe along with an INI file specifying command-line parameters like PATH, CLASSPATH, class name, or other VM arguments. JavaRT assembles the full command line from these settings. Any parameters passed to the JavaRT executable are forwarded as application parameters to the Java application.

• GrpSpawn A workaround for a Windows limitation: the inability to kill a process tree from the outside, as is possible on UNIX systems.

  Only processes within a process tree created with the CREATE_PROCESS_GROUP flag can be killed. The approach is to install a signal handler inside the process tree that waits for an external termination signal. Upon receiving this signal, the handler terminates the root of the process group, causing all child processes to die. Microsoft Visual Studio, for example, uses this pattern when starting a project build so that the build can be terminated at any time.

• Installer An InstallShield clone written in VisualBasic. It includes a USER module where custom installer routines can be placed and called from the installer’s main loop to perform user-specific tasks. This installer was used for deploying KN2’s application server and the associated development environment.