MPE - Integration Case Study

The Licensee

Has a large number of proprietary algorithms written in C/C++.
The current application enables the user to select one algorithm from a menu.
The end-users have requested the ability to programmatically integrate algorithms and analyze their results in an ad-hoc fashion

	pro	con
C/C++, Java	flexible, standard	requires too much skill. requires too much work for ad-hoc analysis. Inflexible to end-user scripting
Visual Basic	flexible, standard	distracting windowing features in development environment
Tcl/Tk, Perl	flexible, standard	primary data types are not numerical, so floating-point operations are slow

provides licensee with the glue to integrates various algorithms.
does not impose any GUI (windowing).
provides licensee's users with ability to quickly develop automation scripts and do ad-hoc exploratory analysis.