Tool integration in CASE environments: the Software Bus

The development of a computer-aided software engineering (CASE) environment which supports the industrialized production of software, known as the factory support environment (FSE), within the European EUREKA Software Factory (ESF) project, is described. An FSE is a distributed communications-oriented CASE environment. The communication integration mechanism of the FSE is the Software Bus, an abstract communication channel which facilitates the exchange of data and control between CASE tools and their component parts. Components and the services they offer and require have descriptions, both in the abstract and of their programming language representations. The Software Bus uses these descriptions to plug components into itself; locate, bind, and match them; and transmit and transform data and control between them