The Design And Implementation Of A Tool For Producing Services From The UI Operations

The establishment of the Distributed Collaborative Development Environment is an important approach to make the design and development more efficient and to realize the interaction and data sharing between tools. The tools integrated in the environment are either software products or those developed by costumers themselves. This paper is based on a project which uses the idea of SOA. The functions of tools are wrapped into Web Services. Uniform APIs are provided to invoke Web Services and details of the tools integration are hidden.Some design tools which do not provide the interface and source code can not be wrapped by API mode, while functions of these tools are required in distributed collaborative development environments. This paper presents a method to produce services from the UI (User Interfaces) operations based on the message stimulation, and designs a tool for producing services from the UI operations named RCMACRO.The architecture of RCMACRO, the collection and resolution of UI operation information are described in detail. The design goals of the tool, technologies and principles which relate to RCMACRO are also presented. Finally, current results of the research are summarized. So far, RCMACRO is only a prototype which only offers limited functions. To improve it, there are still a lot of works to do.