Software Reuse Libraries with Mosaic

This paper describes a Reusable Software Library (RSL) interface and search tool implemented using Mosaic. Mosaic provides a simple, easy-to-use method to nd and extract reusable assets from a RSL, allows distributed access to assets from a variety of platforms, and can support most of the features of formal RSLs without any modiications. Through the use of HyperText Markup Language (HTML) forms, we implemented functions normally found in commercial-grade RSLs, such as component search, user registration, and problem reporting. Automatic generation of HTML pages and the use of command scripts further allowed us to provide diierent views of the RSL, such as search by subject. Finally, integrating the RSL with Wide Area Information Search (WAIS) provided a keyword search with minimal eeort. Our Mosaic RSL cost less than 1% of the cost to develop a standard RSL and has quickly gained favor due to its intuitive interface and simple yet powerful information retrieval tools. 1