INTEROPERABILITY OF MONITORING-RELATED TOOLS

Networking, distributed and grid computing have become the commonly used paradigms ofprogramming. Due to the complicated nature of distributed and grid systems and the increasing complexity of the applications designed for these architectures, the development processneeds to be supported by different kinds of tools at every stage of a development process. Inorder to avoid improper influences of one tool to another these tools must cooperate. Thecooperation ability is called interoperability. Tools can interoperate on different levels, fromexchanging the data in common format, to a semantical level by executing some action asa result of an event in another tool. In this paper we present some interoperability models,with focus on their advantages and major problems due to their use. We also present aninteroperability model designed and used in the JINEXT extension to OMIS specification,intended to provide interoperability for OMIS-compliant tools

Papers accepted for CGW'05 /in alphabetical order by titles/ A Case Study of Interoperability in a Distributed Tools Environment

Nowadays, more and more complex programs and computer systems are being created. Often these programs are specialized- programmers concentrate on very narrow areas of knowledge, what restrains their products from reaching broader audience. In many cases a solution can be to combine several good programs into a large system. Very often, however, simple information exchange between programs is not sufficient and a higher level of cooperation of individual programs (which is called "interoperability") is required. A classic example could be the cooperation of the debugger and the code editor. Applications ' cooperation requires a very well designed system of information exchange. In our solution, we use JINEXT, an interoperability extension to the OCM monitoring system, underlied by the OMIS interface that enables communication between many programs in a distributed environment. Additionally, JINEXT allows each cooperating application to retain transparency of its implementation. As a result the applications do not need to know anything about each other and they are still able to co-operate. Our case study focuses on a debugger and a source code editor. To meet the conditions that may occur in real life, we decided to combine the application we wrote with the program that was developed completely independently. To do this we used the well known "gdb " as the debugger and created the source code editor. The idea of the tools cooperation using JINEXT is fairly simple- it uses a mediator's template that allows th