A Mosaic of Software

In this paper we describe a Software Server, a background process that in conjunction with a central repository of lightweight wrapper scripts allows functionality within heterogeneous software to be called in a simple and consistent manner. The key role of the Software Server is to provide a common interface to software functionality in a manner that can be programmed against, in essence re-introducing an API to compiled code. Using the Java restlet framework, we provide a Restful interface consisting of URL endpoints allowing any programming/scripting language capable of accessing URLs to utilize software functionality as a black box. In addition to being widely accessible the Restful interface allows for a secondary role from Software Servers by giving them the ability to turn any traditional desktop software into a cloud based web service. In this paper we describe these Software Servers, the scripts we use to wrap primarily GUI based software, and show how these servers allow software to be called and interconnected into workflows across distributed machines. Finally, quantitative experiments showing the feasibility of the described Software Servers on a number of applications are presented.