Expanding the Repertoire of Process-based Tool Integration

The purpose of this thesis is to design and implement a new protocol for Black Box tool en veloping in the context of the Oz Process Centered Environment as an auxiliary mechanism that deals with additional families of tools whose character prevents a thoroughly satisfac tory service by the current encapsulation method We mean to address interpretive and query systems multi user collaborative and non collaborative tools and programs that allow incre mental binding of parameters after start up and storing of intermediate and or partial results Our goal is to support a greater amount of interaction between multiple human operators the tools and the environment in the context of complex software development and manage ment tasks During the realization of this project we introduced several concepts related to integration of Commercial O The Shelf tools into Software Development Environments an approach based on multiple enveloping protocols a categorization of tools according to their multi tasking and multi user capabilities the ideas of loose wrapping as opposed to the usual tight wrapping and of persistent tools with respect to the duration of a single task and a functional extension of some intrinsically single user applications to a limited form of collaboration