Jylab Meets Eclipse: Integrating PSEs with Multicomponent Platforms

Jylab is a PSE architecture emphasizing portable computing over distributed platforms. It captures the idea of reusing some of the best open source software projects´ functionality within the context of a single, net-aware, interactive environment. The original implementation of this idea resulted in a system built around a portable interpreter supported by a carefully selected suite of libraries spanning a comprehensive set of applications including scripting, numerical linear algebra, distributed/grid computing and Internet algorithmics. Because Jylab is a multicomponent PSE system, it is quite natural to base its implementation on a robust platform automating the management of complex stacks of software components, i.e. self-describing objects. The Eclipse platform meets this basic prerequisite, additionally providing many other interesting integration facilities, an extensive set of ready-to-use plug-ins and is also embraced by a vibrant community of users, developers and leading software companies. In this paper we describe the design and basic implementation of a flexible environment resulting from the integration of Jylab into Eclipse. To this effect, we survey relevant aspects of the rich Eclipse ecosystem as well as the Jylab approach to PSE construction. To illustrate our environment we present case studies from grid computing, neural network training and native libraries integration.