Old Projects

Urbi et Orbi: a distributed environment framework.

The Urbi et Orbi project aims to build a distributed environment framework whose first applications are virtual worlds. Virtual worlds are virtual 3D scenes personneld with common objects (houses, trees, etc.),avatars (i.e. the virtual image of the users) in which one may walk around and interact. In addition, this virtual world is distributed,in the sense that its full description is spread over several computers, connected via a network. There is no needfor a single host to have a full knowledge of the world. We focus on virtual worlds for a large audience, therefore there are no other material requirements than a standard personal machine, with a connection to a local network or the Internet. Windows and unix or linux platforms are supported. Scalability is required

Transformers: a set of tools to manipulate the C++ language.

Thanks to the keyword template, and almost by accident, C++ is a very special language where one can not only specify what a program will do once compiled, but in addition one can specify how the compiler will compile a program. This feature gave birth to powerful programming techniques, commonly referred to as ``metaprogramming. Because of its committment in the Olena and Vaucanson projects, the LRDE has developped expertize in metaprogramming. Unfortunately the implementation is tricky and very error-prone. Starting from the simple idea that ``we want metaprogramming efficiency, but we don't want to write it, the Transformers project was initiated. It aims at converting naive (but decent) C++ programming into high-speed (but indecent) C++ source code. To this end, several tasks must be addressed: basically the Transformers project aims at designing a set of tools to manipulate C++ programs.