Rapid Software Technology Insertion, without Programming, by Building Applications through Module Composition

Harmonia, Inc., a woman-owned HUB-Zone company, proposes in Phase II of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) topic N05-163, to dramatically reduce time and cost by changing the way complex enterprise applications are assembled. Leveraging past SBIR work, Harmonia proposes to develop a system that allows domain experts to rapidly construct new warfighter applications without programming by integrating (or composing) modules selected from an inventory/catalog of reusable modules. A module is either a simple building block, such as a map or a visualization of missiles’ status, or is a composition of other modules. It uses standards to define how to access information sources (including Net Centric Enterprise Services (NCES), FORCEnet, CORBA, databases, documents, XML, web services, and web pages) and optionally defines a human-computer interface (HCI) for the information in a platform-independent manner. Applications built with the proposed tool can be reinserted into the inventory as a new, composite module, creating an eco-system of warfighter applications that can be built on other applications, to create a “system of systems.” Our proposed inventory also facilitates the Navy’s transition to Open Architecture (OA) because commercial off the shelf (COTS) components can be published in the inventory, and then used in new DoD applications.