Coordinating software development tools with Indra

We address the issue of control integration in the area of software development environments and propose a solution for coordinating software development tools. We first identify six main requirements that should be addressed and show the limitation of existing solutions. We then describe the principles of Indra, a mechanism that we have designed and developed to take into account the identified requirements in an appropriate manner. In particular, our proposal is based on the provision of a declarative language to express coordinations outside the code of tools in a readable way. The language can also be used to express the dynamic evolution of coordinations explicitly, as a finite state machine. Finally, it allows selection of running tools that generate or receive coordinations through a tree-based, associative naming mechanism