Live application programming in the defense industry with the Molecule component framework

At Thales Defense Mission Systems (DMS), software products first go through an industrial prototyping phase. Prototypes are serious applications that we evaluate with our end-users during demonstrations. End-users have a central role in the design process of our products. They often ask for software modifications during demonstrations to experiment new ideas or to focus the existing design on their needs.

In this paper, we present how we combined Smalltalk’s live-programming capabilities with software component models to obtain flexible and modular software designs in our context of live prototyping. We present Molecule, an open-source implementation of the Lightweight CORBA Component Model in Pharo. We use Molecule to build HMI systems prototypes, and we benefit from the dynamic run-time modification capabilities of Pharo during demonstrations with our end-users where we explore software designs in a lively way.

Molecule is an industrial contribution to Smalltalk, as it capitalizes 20 years of usage and maturation in our prototyping activity. The Molecule framework and tools are now mature, and we started building end-user software used in production at Thales DMS. We present two such end-user software and analyze their component architecture, that are representative of how we (learnt to) build HMI prototypes. Finally, we analyze our technological decisions with regards to the benefits we sought for our industrial activity.