DISTRIBUTED OPEN INTERWORKING IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING ENVIRONMENTS

There is a wide-spread belief that the general development of software engineering environments is being hampered by the lack of integration models to allow efficient inter-tool communications and software reus ability. This paper presents a distributed open platform to support to ols interworking in software environments. It focuses on the two key r equirements for interworking that are: tools interfaces specification based on service signatures and an inter-tool communication protocol b ased on message passing. Furthermore, the same approach applies for pr oviding interworking between tools belonging to different software env ironments supported by means of a federation of platforms. (C) 1996 Jo hn Wiley & Sons, Inc.