Open Source Software: All You Do Is Put It Together

Abstract

As of 1 August 2007, SourceForge.net hosted more than 150,000 registered open source software projects, and many more projects are available on other sites. With so many OSS choices, it might seem that building a new application is only a matter of finding the appropriate projects and putting them together. We've developed the adaptable multi-interface communicator infrastructure to support rapid prototyping from OSS components. AMICO is based on existing middleware platforms for component integration, but it focuses on pragmatic aspects of OSS integration often absent from existing integration platforms. AMICO satisfies requirements based on our experiences in solving practical problems in several projects. AMICO OSS is based on a publish-subscribe infrastructure for integrating loosely coupled services. In such infrastructures, a publisher updates a shared data repository. The loosely coupled approach can be highly adaptable when using simple data structures, because new applications can use existing data in the model and add their own without breaking the infrastructure. Components communicate by exchanging events through a shared data repository consisting of named slots called variables. Components can update the variables and register for notifications about variable changes. Modules can also derive new variables by processing existing ones.