1991 Reports

Extending a Tool Integration Language

Gisi, Mark A.; Kaiser, Gail E.

The Marvel environment supports rule-based automation of software processes. Marvel invokes external tools to carry out steps in a software process. One of the major objectives of this research is to invoke external tools to carry out steps in a software process without modifying the tools. This is achieved by encapsulating tools in envelopes, designed to abstract the details of a tool from the Marvel kernel, thereby providing a "black box" interface. Initially we used the Unix shell script language to write envelopes. However, due to several limitations of the shell language the black box abstraction could not be fully supported. We describe these limitations and discuss how we extended the shell language to obtain a new envelope language that fully supports the black box abstraction.