Journal of Applied Science and Engineering

Published by Tamkang University Press

1.30

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1.60

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Jim-Min Lin This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.1, Hongji Yang2 , Guo-Ming Fang1 , Che-Tai Lee1 and Wei-Tsong Lee3

1Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan 407, R.O.C.
2Software Technology Research Laboratory, De Montfort University, Leicester, England
3Department of Electrical Engineering, Tamkang University, Tamsui, Taiwan 251, R.O.C.


 

Received: November 29, 2006
Accepted: February 5, 2007
Publication Date: December 1, 2007

Download Citation: ||https://doi.org/10.6180/jase.2007.10.4.07  


ABSTRACT


This paper presents an approach to distributed commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) based software integration by using the concepts of a multi-agent system and the distributed scripting mechanism. COTS software products are increasingly used to be software components in large-scale systems. Most organisations try to gain the promises of rapidly development and lower cost from reusing COTS components. Nevertheless, COTS-based software system development needs an efficient and useful integration approach. We developed a multi-agent system as an execution platform for distributed COTS software products. Instead of an RPC-like invocation approach, we adopt mobile agents to interoperate COTS software. We also developed a scripting mechanism for helping the software integrator to write a gluer. By using our scripting language constructs and the associated rules, a software integrator can easily write various scripts in various styles. To illustrate this multi-agent system, a distributed CPU-utilisation data collection system, is experimented in our study. Finally, we also successfully developed a graphical user interface tool that would be beneficial and useful for software integrator to edit, debug and display script programs and results.


Keywords: Software Reuse, Distributed Software Integration, Multi-Agent Distributed Scripting System (MADSS), Scripting Language, COTS


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