Nauman Leghari's Blog

Blog about technology, media and other interesting tidbits

  • How do you model concurrent systems?

    In this semester, I am studying a course titled "Concurrent and Distributed Systems". The main objective of this course is to model concurrent applications. We are using a modelling notation called FSP for describing concurrent processes. This language is developed by Jeff Magee & Jeff Kramer and demonstrated in their book "Concurrency: State Models & Java Programs". Apart from the language, the interesting thing is the tool written by them to model/verify the whole process. This tool is called Labelled Transition State Analyser (LTSA) and is available from the author's website (http://www-dse.doc.ic.ac.uk/concurrency/) . I dont think that this modelling approach is widely adopted and neither it is easier to learn, but I wanted to ask your opinion about any other modelling tools available for concurrent and distributed systems.

  • Visual XPath 0.3

    A while back, I made some changes to the Visual XPath tool but didn't get any time to upload it. Now, you can find the tool's description on it's own page and ofcourse you can also download it from here.

  • Back to University

    Well, long time no post :). I dont have much things to say. Atleast a couple of stuff to share.First, I finally did some some work on my Visual XPath application (which I'm going to upload within the next few days) and most importantly, I enrolled for a Masters Degree in Mobile Computing. I haven't done any .NET CF programming before therefore I am looking for some good books or "Getting started" type of tutorials. In the first semester, we have four courses: namely, Mobile Computing, Mobile Performance Engineering, Concurrent and Distributed Systems and Networks & Protocols. There is an optional course of Software Development (though, I will not be taking this) in which they are going to teach Java :) with a book named "Java made simple" ( a title most appropriate for an MSc student). To be honest, It feels very annoying when you see people talking about Java as some standard in teaching. I know that there are lots of libraries and a whole lot of academic projects built with java but so what, give me some space plz. I can see this as an opportunity extend .net to create similar libraries or modules which are already available in Java. Enough for now as I'll talk more about my studies as we move along.