The TOOLBUS Coordination Architecture

Building large, heterogeneous, distributed software systems poses serious problems for the software engineer; achieving interoperability of software systems is still a major challenge. We describe an experiment in designing a generic software architecture for solving these problems. To get control over the possible interactions between software components (“tools”) we forbid direct inter-tool communication. Instead, all interactions are controlled by a “script” that formalizes all the desired interactions among tools. This leads to a component interconnection architecture resembling a hardware communication bus, and therefore we will call it a “ToolBus”.

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