Tool integration in the Pact environment

Abstract

The Pact environment is a software engineering environment (SEE) being built in the Pact project. The environment is being constructed on the PCTE interfaces. The project has detined an environment architecture which identifies Common Services. These are reusable tool components that factor out code that would otherwise have to be developed in several tools, and which significantly increase the integration of the environment. The main activity of the Pact project is to develop "method-independent" tools, independent of a particular engineering technique for the production of software.

Exploiting Persistent Linkage in Software Engineering Environments

“…This paper describes how three facilities of persistent environments, persistent linkage, strong typing and referential integrity, may be used in the construction of software environments. It is clear that the same activities can be supported by other techniques and indeed other integrated programming environments exist (Teitelbaum and Reps, 1981;Reiss, 1984;Teitelman and Masinter, 1984;Sweet, 1985;Habermann and Notkin, 1986;Dowson, 1987;O'Brien, Halbert et al, 1987;Akima and Ooi, 1989;Bott, 1989;Thomas, 1989) . The stronger hypothesis is that the same activities may be modelled with advantage to both the user and the system constructor in a strongly typed environment with referential integrity.…”

“…This paper focuses on the combination of three particular advantages, those of persistent linkage, strong typing and referential integrity. Although other integrated programming environments have been developed (Teitelbaum and Reps, 1981;Reiss, 1984;Teitelman and Masinter, 1984;Sweet, 1985;Habermann and Notkin, 1986;Dowson, 1987;O'Brien, Halbert et al, 1987;Akima and Ooi, 1989;Bott, 1989;Thomas, 1989) , the authors do not know of any that use persistent linkage, strong typing and referential integrity to gain the benefits described here.…”

Tool Integration and Environment Architectures

“…More recent examples of IPSE frameworks are PACT [3] and its conceptual successor, EAST [16]. While each of these systems has a different emphasis, all share the above characteristics.…”

Understanding integration in a software development environment

“…Version control, event or triggering mechanisms, and data abstraction facilities are all typical in this regard [3,15]. Such facilities can be added to the IPSE by extending the database mechanisms (e.g.…”

“…Populated IPSEs such as ISTAR [7] and PACT [15] provide a set of CM end-user services. In the case of ISTAR (and others), the services that have been implemented presuppose a particular usage pattern, and are not readily adaptable to new usage patterns.…”