Cross-platform software reuse by functional integration approach

Software integration is an important and useful approach to software reuse. Most of software integration approaches use data-integration paradigm, i.e., common data format and (or) source code are required for integration. The author proposes a functional integration approach which integrates software by functionalities. No common data format or source codes of the integrated software is required in the approach. Techniques used in the paper can be applied to integrate softwares under DOS, Windows, or even CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) based distributed environments. To make the system user friendly, the author adopts the concept of software IC and define a specification language to describe relationship among integrated software ICs. Based on this approach, a real graphical parking lot management system which integrated AutoCAD and dBase by their functionalities has been implemented successfully and demonstrated