Systems biology researchers make use of a large number of
different software packages for computational modeling and
analysis as well as data manipulation and visualization. To
help developers easily provide the ability for their applications
to communicate with other tools, we have developed a
simple, open-source, application integration framework, the
ERATO Systems Biology Workbench (SBW). In this paper,
we discuss the architecture of SBW, focusing on our motivations for various design decisions including the choice of the message-oriented communications infrastructure
