Saturday, July 31, 2010

PXWB models from software development

PXWB is inspired by software development tools such as Programmer's Workbench, Eclipse, and NetBeans.

The following are excerpts from Software Engineering: Principles and Practice:

"....Software development is generally supported by tools, ranging from those that support a single activity to integrated environments supportlng a complete development process....

....The use of software tools may have a positive effect on both the productivity of the people involved and the quality of the product being developed....The application of tools in the software development process is referred to as Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE)....

....Some products support a specific task in the software development process. Others support the entire software process. The former are called tools, the latter environments. In between these two extremes it is useful to identify CASE products that support a limited set of activities, such as those which comprise the analysis and design stages. Such a coherent set of tools with a limited scope is referred to as a workbench. Environments can be further classified according to the mechanism that ties together the individual tools that make up the environment. In a toolkit, tools are generally not well integrated....

....The essence of integrated and process-centered environments is the sharing of information between the tools that make up the environment....

....No development method is suited for all classes of problems. Likewise, there is no CASE product for all problem classes."

Software Engineering: Principles and Practice
by Hans van Vliet
publisher: John Wiley &Sons
Pub Date: June 30, 2008

Monday, May 24, 2010

PxWB

Chief Judge Paul Michel recently said:

"The patent system is failing primarily because the patent office is failing. In a word, it is dysfunctional. Over 700,000 applications sit unread in a warehouse in Alexandria, Virginia, often for years. Although 400,000 are under examination, their progress is far too slow. And every year almost 400,000 more are filed."

Patent Examiner Work Bench (PxWB) is intended to address the patent application backlog by helping Examiners do their tasks more easily.

PxWB alone won't eliminate the backlog, but PxWB may increase efficiency and quality in patent application examination.

The PxWB integrated environment is open source software and is freely distributed under the GNU General Public License.

Get PxWB at www.pxwb.org and experiment.

Of course, PxWB is a work in progress. Constructive comments are welcomed.