Expanding the Repertoire of Processbased Tool Integration

The purpose of this thesis is to design and implement a new protocol for tool enveloping in the context of the Oz Process Centered Environment This new part of the system would be complementary to the already existing Black Box protocol for Oz and would deal with ad ditional families of tools whose character would be better serviced by a dierent approach providing enhanced exibility and a greater amount of interaction between the human opera tor the tools and the environment during the execution of the wrapped activities To achieve this the concepts of persistent tool platforms tool sessions and transactionlike activities will be introduced as the main innovative features of the protocol We plan to be able to encapsulate and service conveniently classes of tools such as interpretive systems databases medium and large size applications that allow for incremental binding of parameters and par tial retrieving of results and possibly multiuser tools Marginal modication and upgrading of the Oz general architecture and components will necessarily be performed