Integrating through user interface: a flexible integration framework for third-party software

The current trend of constructing new systems from collections of pre-existing third-party software and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products presents serious challenges to existing integration technology. We present a flexible integration framework which has general applicability for pre-existing third-party and COTS software (often highly interactive, with graphical user interface, and without source code access), supports users by allowing them to easily change the way software interacts (thus supporting system evolution and component reusability), and is easily programmable by end-users. Specifically we describe the Tool Integration Language (TIL) and the Tool Integration Server System (TISS) which provide flexible integration mechanisms for our framework and show how they can be used to integrate a set of existing applications and COTS.