FFF97 - Oberon in the Real World

The Oberon programming language and system, subsequently called the Oberon technology, are well known in the software research community. Few applications, however, exist outside academic institutions. This paper describes one of them (FFF97), which constitutes a database front end application that has been in mission critical use by more than 25 concurrent users since 1998. FFF97 makes full use of Oberon’s innovations including dynamic loading, commands, garbage collection, type extension, integrated text and form system, component technologies, model/view separation, low resource consumption, etc. It is claimed that choosing the Oberon technology and a particular approach to software construction, known under the term ‘Prototyping’, was of vital importance for this project, which, as one of the rare examples of custom software development projects, was completed within the scheduled time and budget without compromising quality or functionality.