Two-Layer Wrapping for COTS Software Integration: An Experience with Matlab

Although commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) product integration presents clear advantages in a variety of engineering fields, several problems can arise in part due to their heterogeneous nature. Little research addresses the integration of particular COTS to specific domains. A University of Vigo project for reusable software development in the engineering domain adopted this approach. The underlying hypothesis was that making COTS integration easier would facilitate the development of domain-specific applications. The solution consists of a two-layer wrapping approach. The first layer captures the COTS domain model, facilitating integration of general-purpose functionality. A second layer provides better integration of more domain-specific functionality. Several real software development projects have used the proposed solution, and the results yielded notable effort savings, showing the approach's utility in reducing COTS integration efforts.