XML-based visual specification of multidisciplinary applications

The advancements in the Internet and Web technologies have fueled a growing interest in developing a Web-based distributed computing environment. We have designed and developed Arcade, a Web-based environment for designing, executing, monitoring and controlling distributed heterogeneous applications, which is easy to use and access, portable, and provides support through all phases of the application development and execution. A major focus of the environment is the specification of heterogeneous multidisciplinary applications. We focus on the visual and script-based specification interface of Arcade. The Web/browser-based visual interface is designed to be intuitive to use and can also be used for visual monitoring during execution. The script specification is based on XML to: make it portable across different frameworks; and make the development of our tools easier by using the existing freely available XML parsers and editors. There is a one-to-one correspondence between the visual and script-based interfaces allowing users to go back and forth between the two. To support this we have developed translators that translate a script-based specification to a visual-based specification and vice-versa. These translators are integrated with our tools and are transparent to users.