Tools for XML-based Maintenance of Heterogeneous Software

The paper presents research results related to an ongoing European IST project called MECASP (Maintenance and improvement of componentbased applications diffused in ASP mode), aiming at developing a set of tools for tracking the evolution of heterogeneous software (built using heterogeneous development tools, such as Java IDEs, relational DBMSs, CASE tools, document editors etc). MECASP cannot benefit from existing version management tools like CVS or Microsoft VSS because these tools deal with versioning text files only and have a primitive mechanism for change tracking and version merge. The paper first presents the XML-based solution for software modeling in MECASP. Then, the basic platform and the general architecture of MECASP are given, along with the limits of the existing open source software for the implementation of the XML repository manager, the core of MECASP. The paper also presents the specific features of the MECASP browser, conversion tools and merger.