Versatile interaction specification of tools and agents

Journal ArticleVista is a software infrastructure addressing the vexing problem of software tool interaction?especially how to get egocentric tools to work well together. Vista neither assumes nor requires that tools or tool-mediating agents understand a cooperative messaging protocol, only that they share some common means of interprocess communication. Most IPC mechanisms are too ad hoc and low-level for use by non (or non-expert) programmers. Vista helps by encapsulating such mechanisms in abstract data types obeying high-level protocols. This software framework cleanly integrates a visual language editor, a compiler, libraries, specification analysis tools, and a process control executive into a unified whole