NetBuilder: an environment for integrating tools and people

✍ Scribed by P Dabke; A Cox; D Johnson

• Book ID: 104110561
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 950 KB
• Volume: 30
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0010-4485
• DOI: 10.1016/s0010-4485(97)00098-5

✦ Synopsis

Large-scale, multi-disciplinary engineering processes involve a diverse (and dispesed) set of people and tools, and consequently need mechanisms for tool integration and coordination of human activities. This paper describes a software system called NetBuilder that provides such a mechanism for coordinating collaborative activities in a distributed work environment. There are two key aspects to the NetBuilder approach. The first is the provision of a compositional framework that allows designers to combine individual tools (or ''modules'') into ''megaprograms'' that capture the simulation process, have those megaprograms execute, and store them for future use. The second aspect of the approach is support for ''wrapping'' of individual legacy systems, possibly distributed across a heterogeneous computing network, so that they can be invoked as part of megaprograms in a uniform manner.