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ISEs own original technology reached its peak with Version 2.3, released in 1990. From 1990 to 1993, the technology was reengineered in Eiffel (the first versions, for obvious reasons of necessity, had been written in C), using Version 2.3 for the initial bootstrap. This led to ISE Eiffel 3, a complete graphical development environment first released in 1993, and to its successor ISE Eiffel 4 (1997), incorporating multithreading and concurrency.
Another notable event was the publication in 1995 of Seamless Object-Oriented Software Construction (Waldén & Nerson, 1995), which introduced the business object notation, prolonging Eiffel on the analysis and design side in a form that is attractive to managers, analysts, and system architects.
Today Eiffel is used to develop some of the largest, most ambitious successful software projects in the world. Areas of application include banking, financial systems, accounting, telecommunications, health care, CAD-CAM, simulation, real-time, scientific computing, and scientific visualization. Some of the most visible projects (such as CALFP Banks Rainbow system, initially a derivative trading system but having grown to oversee most of the banks operation) have been extensively documented in the press and are also featured at http://www.eiffel.com.
Eiffel is also popular as a teaching tool in universities and even high schools. A large number of universities are in fact using Eiffel as the first programming language taught to students. Others use it at various levels in the curriculum, aided by attractive packages from the Eiffel product providers.
The name Eiffel is a homage to Gustave Eiffel, the man who built the eponymous tower in Paris as well as many other durable constructions such as the metallic armature of the Statue of Liberty in New York and the Budapest railway station. The Eiffel Tower, started in 1887 for the 1889 Worlds Fair, was completed on time and within budget; it has survived political hostility and attempts at destruction, found many new uses (such as radio and television), and proved to be robust and efficient. Built out of a small number of robust, elegant design patterns, combined and varied repeatedly to yield a powerful result, it is the best symbol of what Eiffel can achieve for the software world.
A large body of literature exists on Eiffel. Here is a selection of the most relevant titles.
Dubois, P. 1996. Object technology for scientific computingObject-oriented numerical software in Eiffel and C. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Describes the application of the Eiffel method and language to numerical computation and the design of the EiffelMath library.
Gore, J. 1996. Object structures: Building object-oriented software components. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Covers data structures using Eiffel with an emphasis on abstraction, reusability, and the proper use of inheritance.
Jézéquel, J.-M. 1996. Object-oriented software engineering with Eiffel. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Emphasizes the application of the Eiffel method and modern software engineering principles to the development of large, mission-critical systems.
Meyer, B. 1988. Object-oriented software construction (1st ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. This is not a book about Eiffel per se, but about object technology in general, using the Eiffel approach and relying on the Eiffel notation. (See second edition.)
Meyer, B. 1992. Eiffel: The language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. This serves as both a detailed language description and the language reference.
Meyer, B. 1994. Reusable software: The base object-oriented component libraries. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. A discussion of library design principles as supported by Eiffel and their application to the EiffelBase libraries.
Meyer, B. 1997. Object-oriented software construction (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. This is not a book about Eiffel per se, but about object technology in general, using the Eiffel approach and relying on the Eiffel notation. Considerably expanded in both breadth and depth from the first edition.
Meyer, B., and J.-M. Nerson (Eds.). 1994. Object-oriented applications. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. This is a collection of chapters written by various project leaders from industrial companies (CAD-CAM, telecommunications, and AI) and describing Eiffel projects in detail: system goals, techniques used, issues encountered, architectural decisions, and practical status.
Rist, R., and R. Terwilliger. 1995. Object-oriented programming in Eiffel. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. A textbook that serves as an introduction to programming with an emphasis on software design principles.
Switzer, R. 1993. Eiffel: An introduction. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. A short and clear presentation of Eiffel, suitable for anyone having had prior experience in another language. Written by one of the authors of the Eiffel/S system.
Thomas, P., and R. Weedon. 1995. Object-oriented programming in Eiffel. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. A textbook that serves as an introduction to programming with emphasis on data abstraction and design by contract.
Waldén, K., and J.-M. Nerson. 1995. Seamless object-oriented software architectureAnalysis and design of reliable systems. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. A lucid description of issues and principles of object-oriented analysis and design, using ideas close to those of Eiffel. Introduces the BON method (business object notation).
Wiener, R. 1995. Software development using EiffelThere can be life other than C++. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. A presentation particularly aimed at readers already familiar with another OO language such as C++.
Wiener, R. 1996. An object-oriented introduction to computer science using Eiffel. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Wiener, R. 1997. Data structures using Eiffel. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
ISEs home page at http://www.eiffel.com is an extensive repository of information about Eiffel with numerous introductory presentations on the technology and its application, and online technology papers on concurrency, multithreading, external interfaces, Eiffel projects, and so on.
GUERL, (for Geoff [Eldridge]s Universal Eiffel Resource Locator) http://www.el;.com, provides considerable amounts of Eiffel information and links to other Eiffel pages.
The following companies provide Eiffel compilers. They are listed here in chronological order of appearance of their initial products.
ISE Eiffelsoft, a division of Interactive Software Engineering Inc., offers the ISE Eiffel 4 environment running on a large number of platforms (Windows, UNIX, Linux, VMS, etc.) including numerous tools and libraries and resells Object Toolss visual Eiffel (see next). ISE Eiffelsoft, 270 Storke Road Suite 7, Santa Barbara, CA 93117, phone 805-685-1006, fax 805-685-6869, info@eiffel.com, http://www.eiffel.com. A time-limited free version can be downloaded from the Web site.
Object Tools is the originator of both the Eiffel/S and Visual Eiffel compilers, as well as a reseller of other compilers. Object Tools GmbH, zu den Bettern 4, 35619 Braunfels, Germany, phone +49 6472 2096, fax +49/6472-911-031, info@object-tools.com, http://www.object-tools.com.
Tower Technology offers the Tower Eiffel compiler and environment, available on a number of platforms, and the Eiffel Booch components. Tower Technology Corporation, 1501 West Koenig Lane, Austin, TX 78756, phone 512-452-9455, fax 512-452-1721, tower@twr.com, http://www.twr.com.
Halstenbach GmbH provides the ISS-Base tools based on Eiffel. Halstenbach ACT, Briedenbrucher Strasse 2, D-51674 Wiehl-Bomig, Germany, phone +49-2261- 9902-0, fax +49-2261-9902-99, info@hact.de, http://www.hact.de.
The Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Nancy (CRIN) is the source of the SmallEiffel compiler, also known as GNU Eiffel and distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. It is available from http://www.loria.fr/projects/SmallEiffel.
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