1995 Reports

Interfacing Oz with the PCTE OMS

Lee, Wenke; Kaiser, Gail E.

This paper details our experiment interfacing Oz with the Object Management System (OMS) of PCTE. Oz is a process-centered multi-user software development environment. PCTE is a specification which defines a language independent interface providing support mechanisms for software engineering environments (SEE) populated with CASE tools. Oz is, in theory, a SEE that can be built (or extended) using the services provided by PCTE. Oz historically has had a native OMS component whereas the PCTE OMS is an open data repository with an API for external software tools. Our experiment focused on changing Oz to use the PCTE OMS. This paper describes how several Oz components were changed in order to make the Oz server interface with the PCTE OMS. The resulting system of our experiment is an environment that has process control and integration services provided by Oz, data integration services provided by PCTE, and tool integration services provided by both. We discusses in depth the concurrency control problems that arise in such an environment and their solutions. The PCTE implementation used in our experiment is the Emeraude PCTE V 12.5.1 supplied by Transtar Software Incorporation.