Web services-based tool-integration in the ETI platform

Abstract

In this paper we present dETI, the next generation of the Electronic Tool Integration (ETI) platform, an open platform for the interactive experimentation with and coordination of heterogeneous software tools via the internet. Our redesign, which is based on the experience gained while running the ETI platform since 1997, focusses on the tool integration process, which clearly marked the bottleneck for the wide acceptance of the ETI platform on the side of an important group of users: the tool providers. The new integration approach makes use of standard Web Services technology, which perfectly fits in the overall ETI architecture.Our approach realizes a clear separation of concerns, which overcomes all the previously observed obstacles by (i) decoupling the integration tasks of the tool providers and the ETI team, (ii) pulling the ETI team out of the upgrading and maintenance loop and (iii) handing the upgrading and access control over to the tool providers.This guarantees the scalability in the number of tools available within ETI, and addresses the flexibility concerns of the tool providers. Motivation and contributionThe Electronic Tool Integration platform (ETI) [33] is an online platform specifically designed to support the distributed use of and experimentation with tools over the internet. Born in 1996 and online since early 1997, it offered a unique service to tool providers and users: its solution for the remote execution of tools and the internet-based administration of user-specific home areas on the ETI server was well ahead of the technology of those times. Since then, users can -retrieve information about the tools, -execute tools in stand-alone mode, or -combine functionalities of different tools to obtain sequential programs called coordination sequences and run them in tool-coordination mode.In particular, users can combine functionalities of tools of different application domains to solve problems a single tool never would be able to tackle. Obviously, the richness of the tool repository plays a crucial role in the success of ETI: maximum benefit can be gained from the experimentation and coordination facilities 1 of the platform if the repository is filled with a large amount and variety of well classified softwaretools. The success of ETI is thus highly sensitive to the process and costs of tool integration.At the same time, our experience shows that the current integration process needs reconsideration: as discussed in Sect. 4, the apparently straightforward integration process is still too demanding to be easily accepted by the tool providers. The effort required to integrate new tools is in fact perceived as too large and too ETIspecific [25]. Although there is a community of interested tool users, insufficient ease of integration becomes the limiting factor. What we need to leverage the technology is thus a much simpler approach to tool integration.In this paper we show how, taking advantage of newer technologies that internally base on Web Services, we can 1 Tool Coordination is the ETI ...

Synthesizing Semantic Web Service Compositions with jMosel and Golog

“…This is the motivation for us to work on a common platform for experimentation, where the different techniques can be evaluated, compared, modified and combined. Technological basis for this is the jABC/jETI modeling and experimentation framework [4,5,6,7], which has been initiated more than 10 years ago [14], and which has shown its power in other contexts, see e.g. our model learning environment [24,25].…”

“…We first directly modeled the mediator's orchestration in the jABC [4,5,6,7], our framework for service oriented development and model-driven orchestration, and generated and published the mediator using our jETI technology. In jABC, processes are orchestrations, they are modeled as directed flow graphs called Service Logic Graphs (SLG), where the nodes, which represent the services, are called Service Independent Building Blocks (SIBs).…”

Supporting the internet-based evaluation of research software with cloud infrastructure

“…Regarding the effort concern, consider for example the amount of work that authors need to perform for adopting heavyweight integration approaches such as the Electronic Tool Integration Platform (jETI [30,32,42]). The idea of approaches such as jETI is that authors make their code callable remotely using web service technology.…”

jETI: A Tool for Remote Tool Integration

“…The background and a first attempt to the new distributed way of tool integration for ETI have been described in [3]. Our current version of ETI, jETI, -exploits Web Services technology [14, 13, 11] to further simplify the remote tool integration and execution, -supports cross platform execution of the coordination models based on the quasi standard set by Java, and it naturally -flexibilizes the original coordination level by seamlessly integrating the Eclipse development framework [2].…”