Applications are either based on external executables or on functions
internal to the environment. All operations necessary to invoke an
application and to return its
output data are encapsulated by a binding function, which
establishes a uniform interface between the environment and the
application
.
Applications can be defined and added to the framework during sessions
without need for interrupting any active tasks.
Figure 4.11
shows a piece of code used to define an application based on an
external simulator.
A GUI is generated
completely automatically on demand from this declaration without any
further coding required.
Nevertheless, to reflect complex interdependencies
of an applications parameters, more sophisticated interfaces can be
defined by the user via an object-oriented GUI generator [Str96].
Figure 4.11:
Example code for tool binding function for SKETCH simulator.