Integrating tools in the ETI platform

The ETI Online Service complements the STTT journal by providing an opportunity to experiment interactively via the World Wide Web with tools presented in STTT papers. A precondition to an advanced, cooperative usability of those tools is the integration of their functionalities into the ETI platform, which forms the basis for the ETI coordination environment. This paper gives an overview of the tool integration tasks, explains what has to be done for a tool's integration, and examines some of the possible alternatives. Furthermore, a layered integration model is defined, on which a first integration scheme based on design patterns is proposed. Some criteria for tool integrability are also proposed, in the hope that, together with an improved automation of the integration process, large portions of the tool integration will be taken over by the tool providers themselves, or by integration teams, instead of the ETI Service management team itself as at present.