This tutorial is an introduction to the design, development, test and maintenance of large scale applications with the ECLiPSe system. It follows a top-down methodology of converting an initial high-level specification into executable code of high quality. We assume that fundamental decisions on selecting the right tool and the right problem solver have already been taken so that we are commited to using ECLiPSe and one of its problem solving libraries. We are basically interested in the engineering aspects of the program development, not its research and development content.
At the same time we provide a number of programming concepts, standard templates that can be used for many ECLiPSe programming tasks. A knowledge of these concepts helps the programmer not only to understand existing code more rapidly, but also should lead to standard solutions whenever a new problem has to be solved.
The tutorial uses excerpts from one of applications developed by Parc Technologies to highlight some of the design choices and also to provide code examples taken from real-life components. This application is centered on IP network analysis, so devices like routers and interfaces will occur throughout the example code. A detailed understanding of the application domain should not be required to understand and re-use the examples.