  Tools are an essential part of every software engineering project. But the
number of tools that are used in all phases of the software development
life-cycle and their complexity is growing continually. Consequently, the setup
and maintenance of current tool chains and development environments requires
much effort and consumes a lot of time. One approach to counter this, is to
employ web-based systems for development tasks, because centralized systems
simplify the administration and the deployment of new features. But desktop
IDEs play an important role in software development projects today, and will
not be replaced entirely by web-based environments in the near future.
Therefore, supporting a mixture of hosted tools and tools integrated into
desktop IDEs is a sensible approach. In this paper, we present the SSELab, a
framework for web- based project portals that attempts to migrate more software
development tools from desktop to server environments, but still allows their
integration into modern desktop IDEs. It supports the deployment of tools as
hosted services using plug-in systems on the server-side. Additionally, it
provides access to these tools by a set of clients that can be used in
different contexts, either from the command line, from within IDEs such as
Eclipse, or from web pages. In the paper, we discuss the architecture and the
extensibility of the SSELab framework. Furthermore, we share our experiences
with creating an instance of the framework and integrating various tools for
our own software development projects.
