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Concluding Remarks
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6.2. Personal Gains
Although the work developed was not deployed to a real world environment, and thus was not a complete
fulfilment of the objectives, it allowed a lot of personal achievement.
This dissertation was an opportunity to be in the midst of an increasingly demanding project, and
participate in a project that evolved its way of working to match the project requirements.
This work was a personal opportunity of enhancing some areas of knowledge and the ability to embark in
new ones. The most rewarding ones were the patterns and XP programming areas. Although there was some
previous experience in working with patterns, their use was never quite important and productive as in this
development. Patterns are, for my account, ineludible in large projects.
These last statements might seem contradictory to the embracement of XP, but, as was said in a XP’s
speech, a programmer’s life cycle follows this road. It passes through the wide use of patterns and then goes
to XP. We might disagree with this opinion in some points, but the paths that the project made us follow,
confirm his statement. XP proved to be a powerful way of coding, primarily by its testing principles.
Following the KISS theory (see III) is another of its major strengths.
A new area approached was ATM technology. The approach to it was made with small steps and a little
more reluctantly than with the previous technologies. However, this subject proved also of great interest.
Although, probably failing to reach the end user, ATM is still a technology to be explored as some other
projects (in development) might prove.
TV and digital content were (as stated before) a little strayed from the primary development. Nonetheless,
they were mentioned, in order to place the reader in the projects’ context. Although networks would transport
content, to this work it did not matter too much if it was other data besides video, audio or metadata. The
important issues (in this thesis, not in the project) were to be able to control sources and sinks and to make
data delivery from the former to the latter. This led to a shallower involvement with this area.
In the end, I can say that there are only gains to account for.
6.3. Topics needing further development
Even though the ATM solution is not part of the project plans, there were some issues left to address that
deserve to be mentioned.
The need for QoS was stated at an early stage, but seemed to wear out during the course of time.
Nevertheless, the classes developed for DETAIL should be enhanced in order to make full use of the ACE
classes for ATM QoS.
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6.3 Topics needing further development