Claude Petitpierre

Biography

Claude Petitpierre has received his diploma of Electrical Engineer in 1972 from EPFL. He spent the next 5 years in the industry, where he participated in the development of realtime cement plant control. He went back to EPFL, obtained the title of Doctor in 1984 and then spent one year (1985-1986) at the AT&T Bell Labs in Holmdel. He was appointed professor in 1987.
He is interested in the theories and techniques that can support the development of complete and reliable software products and in the formal modeling and analysis theories. The work pursued in his laboratory led to the development of a parsimonious superset of Java, supporting concurrency with a concept close to the one provided by formal languages such as CCS or CSP. He is currently devising a development environment that supports the creation of J2EE application in the frame of software engineering.
Claude Petitpierre is also interested in computer aided teaching. He has developed a computer aided programming course that has been used by first year students.

CURRENT WORK

	WebLang:		This is a language in which developers can very quickly create the prototype of a Web Applications based on J2EE (database, user interfaces, business layer...)
	Synchronous Objects:		An original concept for handling multiprocessing and based on a concept of active objects
	e-learning:		Programming tutorial (in French)

TEACHING

Internet Programming

This course presents most components of the J2EE environment (servlets, Struts, persistent objects, queues, clients) with the help of a simple language, WebLang.

Software Engineering

The students, among groups of 5 students, use the environment described above to design and realize realistic applications such as a stock exchange (customers handle portofolios in the bank and negotiate shares in a stock exchange) or a realtime distributed monopoly game with database, thin and rich clients.