SSELab: A Plug-In-Based Framework for Web-Based Project Portals

摘要

Tools are an essential part of every software engineering project. But thenumber of tools that are used in all phases of the software developmentlife-cycle and their complexity is growing continually. Consequently, the setupand maintenance of current tool chains and development environments requiresmuch effort and consumes a lot of time. One approach to counter this, is toemploy web-based systems for development tasks, because centralized systemssimplify the administration and the deployment of new features. But desktopIDEs play an important role in software development projects today, and willnot be replaced entirely by web-based environments in the near future.Therefore, supporting a mixture of hosted tools and tools integrated intodesktop IDEs is a sensible approach. In this paper, we present the SSELab, aframework for web- based project portals that attempts to migrate more softwaredevelopment tools from desktop to server environments, but still allows theirintegration into modern desktop IDEs. It supports the deployment of tools ashosted services using plug-in systems on the server-side. Additionally, itprovides access to these tools by a set of clients that can be used indifferent contexts, either from the command line, from within IDEs such asEclipse, or from web pages. In the paper, we discuss the architecture and theextensibility of the SSELab framework. Furthermore, we share our experienceswith creating an instance of the framework and integrating various tools forour own software development projects.