Tool integration: experiences and directions

As more software support tools become available, the construction of support environments by integration of existing tools becomes more desirable. The European project 'Broadband Object-Oriented Service Technology' investigated the adaptation and integration of existing software tools to support telecommunications service creation. The investigation covered different approaches to adapting and integrating existing tools to form a service creation environment. The earliest environment encapsulated a wide range of these tools within an environment called EAST, supplied by the Societe Francaise de Genie Logiciel. While EAST provided a number of benefits, the users of the environment expressed a desire for small special-purpose toolkits which were created by the tool-to-tool integration of specific tools. These toolkits were used on their own, and were also encapsulated within EAST. With the advent of Tcl, a language which facilitates tool programmability, it became possible to create programmable 'capsules', and these were used for later encapsulations within EAST. Tcl also made it possible to create more flexible toolkits by direct tool-to-tool integration. Experiences with all these different approaches are presented here, and future directions are discussed.