Thanks Darin. ALMIIF?s process-centric and model-driven interface
simplifies the task of integration and interoperability across tools in
the Application Lifecycle by focusing on the uniform nature of the
?application model? definition that is accessed throughout the lifecycle
instead of point-to-point integration between these various tools. For
example, a QA tool might need to access information from a business
modeling tool that describes the various process flows and use cases
associated with a new business application in order to auto-generate the
associated test scripts. A point-to-point integration would require a
tight coupling between these tools leveraging their corresponding APIs.
The point-to-point approach will take advantage of the unique
functionality built into each tool but at a great cost since the
tool-specific API consists of a myriad of actions that are tied to a
specific version of one vendor?s tool. In contrast, the ALMIIF limits the
functionality directly accessible via the API, but enables all the tools
to be applied to the common application model, surpassing the
functionality provided by any single vendor. ALMIIF provides an
extensible common XML-based vocabulary/grammar that describes the
?application model? and provides common services to manipulate the model.
These common services as well as new services will be made available using
the Eclipse IDE design-time framework. In addition, ALMIIF provides an
enterprise service bus that allows all the various tools participating in
the lifecycle to interact with and/or manipulate the model at runtime.
This enterprise service bus also facilitates the orchestration of several
tools to create processes that span multiple tools across the Application
lifecycle.