With the increasing complexity of projects, many users and teams rely on various kinds of analyses to check if their work (code, models, requirements, etc.) is correct. While various analyses are often performed as part of the CI/CD pipelines, many users would prefer to perform them before submitting (publishing) their work. Yet many analysis tools needs to be installed, configured, and started externally, which can be difficult for many users, especially when they are not proficient with the tools.
Within the EU project Arrowhead Tools, the VeriFIT research group from Brno University of Technology is working on a way to wrap analysis tools into OSLC-compliant web services which can then be invoked from the Eclipse IDE remotely. This frees the users from installing and configuring the tools themselves, allows the tools to be offloaded to servers where they can run 24/7, while allowing the users to use the tools from the IDE where they have their project. To allow automatic discovery of available analysis tools, we are utilizing the Eclipse Arrowhead framework which allows the web services to register themselves and the Eclipse IDE to locate them.
In the talk, we will show the overall architecture of our system and then demonstrate how one can wrap its own tool into an OSLC-compliant web service and later invoke the tool remotely from an Eclipse project. With the Arrowhead framework in place and the tools wrapped into OSLC-compliant web services, the end user only needs to install the plugin for invoking the services into Eclipse from an Eclipse update site and then can start invoking any registered analysis tool.
