Unite: an adapter for transforming analysis tools to web services via OSLC

What is it about?

This paper presents an adapter called Unite and our industrial experience with it. Unite allows anyone to make a command-line tool accessible as a web service without the need to modify any source code. Furthermore, the created service uses a REST interface based on the OSLC Automation specification, which can make it much easier to adopt for those familiar with OSLC. Unite can also be paired with UniC (Unite Client) to make interacting with Unite's REST interface as easy as clicking a button in an IDE such as Eclipse.

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Why is it important?

Transforming a tool to a web service with Unite can be done very quickly (a matter of minutes if you have prior experience, and an hour or two including the setup of everything if its your first time) and without the need to be an expert on web services or an experienced programmer. Tools accessible as web services have a range of advantages. From the setup perspective, the tool will be installed on a server instead of needing to be installed by every user (which can be complicated for some tools, for some users, or on some machines), the tool setup can be done by a server admin (or generally by someone other than the users of the tool), and the server can be tailored to the tool (the right operating system, other required dependencies and their versions, higher performance then a user's laptop, etc.). From the perspective of tool users who already have experience with using a tool through Unite, all it takes to adopt a new tool is to start interacting with a different web service (which will only differ in what inputs the tool requires). For tool users new to using tools through Unite, there will be some adoption time needed which can be made easy with a good client, but they only need to setup the client once for all tools instead of having to setup every tool.

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