System Design Tools Integration And Service Generation

Designing in distributed collaborative-development environments, it is essential for different design tools to work together with others. Effective integration of design tools has become a key point. This paper begins with the methods of UI integration and API integration of tools supporting OLE, based on Eclipse. UI integration makes different tools share the same UI, and API integration can provides APIs, which encapsulate functions of the tools or their combinations, for customers. As to tools that can be integrated in the same way, a method of automatically integrating has been introduced. The implementation of integration accomplished automatically via tool-specific information extracted from the same integration frame. After rebuilding the project, the newly integrated tools can be used.For the integration implemented by C++, the tools being integrated are divided to two different kinds: EXE and API. In respect that both of them should be accessed by the uniform interface, C++ and Python hybrid programming is used to encapsulate them to be services, which can be called indistinctively by Python. Scalability is achieved by data-driven method for the former while meta-information model, which is used to describe the characteristics, for the latter. And for the API integration, the files of the project can be created and the whole project can be rebuilt automatically. With this method, new tools, EXE or API, will be efficiently wrapped to be services. These services not only hide the differences between access methods of different system design tools, but also provide transparent and indistinctive functions, which can be called dynamically by the caller through the uniform interfaces.