Integrating heterogeneous software tools with each other on a peer-to-peer level for
streamlining the end user's workflow is an area of ongoing research. The ideal tool integration
solution would provide users a transparent way to integrate and connect existing tools, without
leaving the native interface. Functionality of individual tools can then be shared and
commonality in data models is exploited by creating relations between corresponding data
elements.
A special problem is the flexible integration of existing, often commercial-off-the-shelf
(COTS-)tools, as encountered e.g. in the engineering domain. These often provide only
proprietary and closed APIs with limited capabilities, posing various restrictions on the
design of a prospective integration solution. Several frameworks and standards, such as CDIF,
PCTE, OTIF or BOOST have been developed, including general-purpose tool platforms like
Eclipse, but so far these have only solved parts of the problem, lacking a holistic, dynamic
approach for integrating existing or proprietary tools.
From a user's perspective, tight integration between tools is desired, facilitating working
across tool borders in a transparent way. From a developer's perspective, loosely-coupled
integration and a dynamic way to integrate new tools into the framework with little effort is
desired, sothat the resulting solution is easily adaptable to new tools and changing APIs. Tool
vendors want to stay independent and will not accept additional cost for reimplementing or
adapting tools to work with specific integration solutions, but often provide scripting
interfaces and language-specific APIs for connecting tools to other applications.
This work demonstrates that tool integration faces many of the same challenges encountered in
enterprise integration, where already several best practices, patterns and
integration-standards such as Java Business Integration (JBI ) and the Service Component
Architecture (SCA) have evolved. By applying successful solutions from enterprise integration
to the problem of tool integration on the desktop, a reusable and extensible integration
solution can be realized that is easily adaptable to new tools and requirements. This work
examines the current situation and demonstrates howe the JBI standard can be utilized for tool
integration, propsing a standards based, dynamic tool integration framework.
One of the few existing tool integration solutions that target this problem is ToolNet, a
custom, service-oriented integration framework developed by EADS Corporate Research Centre
Germany. ToolNet connects existing, commercial off-the-shelf engineering tools, such as
Telelogic DOORS or Matlab, using custom Adapters and a proprietary messaging backbone. After an
analysis of the current architecture and its limitations, mainly the static Adapter
architecture, the findings in this work are applied in a prototype implementation that
demonstrates a redesign of ToolNet based on the JBI standard. The prototype is then evaluated
and compared to the existing ToolNet framework.
