SNiFF+ talks to Rational Rose: inter-operability using a common exchange model

Nowadays development environments are required to be open: users want to be able to work with a combination of their preferred commercial and home-grown tools. TakeFive has opened up SNiFF+ with a so-called "Symbol Table API"; Rational has opened up the UML tool Rose via the so-called "Rose Extensibility Interface (REI)". On the other hand, efforts are underway to define standards for exchanging information between case-tools; CDIF being a notable example. This paper reports on our experience to generate UML diagrams in Rational Rose from the symbol table in SNiFF+ using a standard CDIF exchange format.