Evaluation of plug-in technologies for the EAI domain and extension of the eclipse platform with a middleware layer for plug-ins

This diploma thesis deals with EAI (Enterprise Application Integration)-based integration solutions for plug-in technologies and for Eclipse plug-ins in particular. Even though the integration of plug-ins into a single application is already very advanced today, there is no possibility to integrate these plug-ins into an EAI-based solution. Therefore this thesis aims at laying the foundations of an EAI-based integration of plug-ins. First of all, some concepts of the application integration are presented. The most appropriate concept is to be adopted for the EAI-based integration of Eclipse plug-ins. Furthermore, the plug-in-based extensibility of current IDEs and two domain-specific plug-in technologies are examined in order to find a solution how a plug-in functionality can be provided outside of its main application. In a case study a new specification called Java Business Integration is used and tested to create an EAI-based integration solution for the Eclipse tool SAVE (Software Architecture Visualization and Evaluation). Finally, the case study is generalized so that it can be applied to further integration projects. Moreover, two implementations of Java Business Integration (Open ESB and ServiceMix) are compared to each other.