tool integration using the web-services approach
This paper proposes a protocol for data exchange to allow the communication of specialized tools with Eletronic Design Automation (EDA) frameworks. The BICO (BasIc type COnversor) protocol is based on SOAP, a Web-Service technology. The aim of BICO is to support interoperability, integration and cooperation between scripting and general-purpose languages, with minimum programming effort. The BICO protocol is able to automatically encode and decode data structures used as parameters of requests and replies of services implemented in different languages. Beyond the coder and decoder (CODEC) itself, a helper tool for the creation of the definitions needed by the protocol and some basic communication mechanisms is provided. Case studies are used to demonstrate the integration of specialized tools with commercial frameworks. The proposed protocol achieves interoperability with a simple and easy-to-learn mechanism and yet is very efficient for the purposes it was designed. The proposed integration method has learning costs affordable by university and small developers that want their tools linked to commercial environments or frameworks.
interoperability script languages