Automated Support for Seamless Interoperability in Polylingual Software Systems - Abstract

Barrett, D.J., Kaplan, A. and Wileden, J.C., Automated Support for Seamless Interoperability in Polylingual Software Systems, The Fourth Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, San Francisco, CA, USA, October, 1996.
Existing approaches to support for interoperability are inadequate because they lack seamlessness: that is, they generally force software developers to compensate explicitly for the existence of multiple languages or the crossing of language boundaries. In this paper we first discuss some foundations for polylingual interoperability, then review and assess existing approaches. We then outline PolySPIN, an approach in which interoperability can be made transparent and existing systems can be made to interoperate with no visible modifications. We also describe PolySPINner, our prototype implementation of a toolset providing automated support for PolySPIN. We illustrate the advantages of our approach by applying it to an example problem and comparing PolySPIN's ease of use with that of an alternative, CORBA-style approach.
Alan Kaplan
Last modified: Wed Aug 27 18:27:20 EDT