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., a common data format and (or) source code are required for integration. In this paper, we propose a functional integration approach which integrates software by functionalities. No common data format or source codes of the integrated softwares Is required in our approach. Techniques used in this paper can be applied to integrate softwares under DOS, Windows, or even CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) based distributed environments. To make our system user friendly, we adopt the concept of software IC and define a specification language to describe relationship among integrated software ICs. Based an this approach, a real graphical parking lot management system which integrated AutoCAD and dBase bf their functionalies has been implemented successfully and demonstrated in this paper.