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6. INTEGRATION WITH VIRTU 6.4. SmART integration
Processing Layer, the Web Front-End uses the External Interfaces component as
an interface to the tool.
6.3.4 Other Notable Sectors
Apart from the presented layers and components, VIRTU makes use of other sectors that are not
included in the tool architecture, but their relevance is considerable enough for the integration
of SmART with VIRTU.
The VIRTU tool employs some third-party software which is also integrated with the tool,
as is the case of MySQL for the provision of a relational database management system or Eclipse
for the linkage of Java objects to the database. These components are COTS (Commercial, off-
the-shelf), software built by other entities which can be integrated with the objective of quickly
providing functionalities to the tool, possibly saving time by removing the need to build those
functionalities from scratch, but at the cost of some integration work. VIRTU keeps these third-
party components in a CVS (Concurrent Versions System) repository, from where they can be
accessed.
Another important data sector is located inside the virtual machines created by the tool.
This sector hosts the first-run and configuration scripts which are ran automatically by each
virtual machine so that they get the required data from the tool autonomously.
6.4 SmART integration
The VIRTU workflow and architecture were described in the previous sections. Using that
knowledge, this section describes how SmART fits in the VIRTU workflow and the where-
abouts of the SmART component placement in the VIRTU architecture. The integration takes
on both SmART major components, the Original to Generic syntax Converter (OGC) and the
Generic to Original syntax Converter (GOC, see Section 3.2), and employs them on separate
VIRTU components. OGC is used in the creation of configuration file templates when adding
new Building Blocks to VIRTU while GOC is used by the virtual machines to generate config-
uration files from templates.
In the VIRTU workflow, SmART will be called for the first time when an administrator adds
new Building Blocks. As it was seen in Section 6.3.1, these can either be applications, oper-
ating systems or virtual machines. In this case, a Publication File needs to be associated
to that Building Block. For this endeavour, SmART is used to transpose the Building
Block configuration files, whose parameterization is relevant, into XML documents, generat-
ing a Publication File. This Publication File is then stored in the Configuration
Database, from where it is obtained when its usage is required (i.e., when a user requires
the instantiation of an Assembly Configuration composed by that Building Block).
There might be the case where one or more configuration files of an application are unknown
to the tool. If such is the occasion, the administrator must define a grammar which recognizes
the new configuration file in order to build a parser for it. In the end, a new Building
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