Automated Generation Of Wrappers For Interoperability

摘要

Interoperability between software systems is the ability to exchange services from one system to another. In order to exchange services, data and commands are relayed from the service providers to the requesters. Presently, there are some interoperability techniques that aid the exchange of information, ranging from low-level sockets and messaging techniques to more sophisticated middleware technology like object resource brokers. Middleware technology uses higher abstraction than messaging, and can simplify the construction of interoperable applications. It provides a bridge between the service provider and requester by providing standardized mechanisms that handle communication, data exchange and type marshalling. However, in current interoperability techniques, data and services are tightly coupled to a particular server. Furthermore, most developers are trained in developing stand-alone applications rather than distributed applications. This thesis aims at developing a generic interface wrapper that can be used to separate the data and services from the server, and allows the developers to treat distributed data and services as those they are local within an application process space. In addition, the research developed a program to fully automate the process of generating the interface wrapper directly from a specification language such as Prototype System Description Language (PSDL).