Geoffrey Clemm
Abstract
This paper describes research associated with the development and evaluation of Odin-an environment integration system based on the idea that tools should be integrated around a centralized store of persistent software objects. The paper describes this idea in detail and then presents the Odin architecture, which features such notions as the typing of software objects, composing tools out of modular tool fragments, optimizing the storage and rederivation of software objects, and isolating tool interconnectivity information in a single centralized object. The paper then describes some projects that have used Odin to integrate tools on a large scale. Finally, it discusses the significance of this work and the conclusions that can be drawn about superior software environment architectures.
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Index Terms
- A mechanism for environment integration
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Reviews
James Dennis Kiper
Odin is a research software system developed at the University of Colorado at Boulder to facilitate the rapid and effective integration of software tools. The paper's intended audience is researchers in software engineering and programming environments. One of the primary contributions of the Odin system is its data-centered rather than tool-centered approach. Odin maintains a repository of data objects consisting of the input to, and output from, the integrated tools. These objects are relatively large-grained, such as source code, parse trees, documentation, and test data. The integrated tools, such as parsers and dataflow analyzers, are similarly large-grained. One of the major conceptual contributions of this research is the use of a specification language to specify the relationships among tool fragments and objects. This allows existing and new tools to be incorporated easily into Odin without modification. Relationship information is incorporated into Odin's Derivation Graph. When the user asks for an invocation of a complex tool, Odin consults this Derivation Graph to determine what tool fragments need to be invoked on which objects to accomplish this result. This well-written, well-organized description of the Odin system seems to reveal the important design principles and research contributions of this project in sufficient detail and at an appropriate length. These contributions are illustrated in several useful examples. I found the paper quite interesting and instructive. The only shortcoming was the out-of-date references.
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