Flexible Component Composition through Communication Abstraction

Proceedings. 11th IEEE International Conference and Workshop on the Engineering of Computer-Based Systems, 2004., 2004

Architecture description languages (ADL) describe systems as a collection of components that interact with each other using connectors. They define components explicitly, however they leave the definition of interactions implicit. Interactions are defined through include files and import and export statements (the connectors are buried inside the components). This implicitly of describing interactions (connectors) makes it difficult to build heterogeneous

Proceedings of the 14th international ACM Sigsoft symposium on Component based software engineering - CBSE '11, 2011

Component-based software engineering provides for developers the ability to easily reuse and assemble software entities to build complex software. Component-based specification of software functionality has been and is largely addressed, however this is not yet the case for what concerns software non-functionality. In this paper, we propose a new way to express component-based software non-functional documentation, and we will focus more specifically on architecture constraints which formalize parts of architecture decisions, as executable, customizable, reusable and composable building blocks represented by components. Checking of architecture constraints is provided via service invocation through ports of a special kind of components, called constraint-components. The signatures of these checking services can be defined in required interfaces of business components, to document decisions taken while designing their architecture. They can also be part of other required interfaces of constraint components, making it possible to build higher-level or more complex constraints while reusing existing ones. We present an example of implementation of constraint components using, an ADL which is introduced in this paper. Architecture constraints can then be checked on the architecture of business components at design-time using the CLACS tool support, which has been implemented as an Eclipse plugin.

In component-based system, connectors are used to compose components. Connectors should have a semantics that makes them simple to construct and use. At the same time, their semantics should be rich enough to endow them with desirable properties such as genericity, compositionality and reusability. For connector construction, compositionality would be particularly useful, since it would facilitate systematic construction. This paper we describe a hierarchical approach to component and connector definition and construction that allows components and connectors to be defined and constructed from sub-components and connectors. These composite elements are indeed generic, compositional and reusable.

2008 Electronics, Robotics and Automotive Mechanics Conference, 2008

Presently, not only a large amount of information resources are available on the Web, but also a complete lattice of dynamic applications, namely, software components and Web Services. Hence, an increasing demand of a proper model and architecture for composition of software components has triggered a huge amount of integration efforts. However, most of them are partially ignoring operational and knowledge-oriented aspects which can hinge on semantics. In this paper, we present a semantically enhanced framework for software composition focusing on component-based systems.

2006

Currently, a large amount of information resources are available on the the Web. These information resources include not only the data existing on the web but also dynamic applications, namely, software components distributed all over the Internet. An increasing demand of a proper model and architecture for composition of software components has triggered a huge amount of integration efforts. Most of the known integration approaches ignore the services and operational aspects offered by software components. They are mostly ad hoc and hardly customized solutions. This paper presents a semantically-enhanced model and architecture for composition of software components, specially, software component, basic reusable building blocks of component-based application systems.

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2002

In this paper, we propose a means to enhance an architecture description language with a description of component behavior. A notation used for this purpose should be able to express the "interplay" on the component's interfaces and reflect step-by-step refinement of the component's specification during its design. In addition, the notation should be easy to comprehend and allow for formal reasoning about the correctness of the specification refinement and also about the correctness of an implementation in terms of whether it adheres to the specification. Targeting all these requirements together, the paper proposes to employ behavior protocols which are based on a notation similar to regular expressions. As a proof of the concept, the behavior protocols are used in the SOFA architecture description language at three levels: interface, frame, and architecture. Key achievements of this paper include the definitions of bounded component behavior and protocol conformance relation. Using these concepts, the designer can verify the adherence of a component's implementation to its specification at run time, while the correctness of refining the specification can be verified at design time.

Fundamental Approaches to Software …, 2003

In this paper we present CCDL, our description language for composable components. We have introduced hierarchically composable components as means to achieve finetuned customization of component based systems. A composable component is defined by a fixed contractual specification of its external view and a set of structural constraints for its internal configuration. The internal configuration of a composable component is not fixed, but will be composed according to different requirements and has to comply with the structural constraints. This permits a high degree of unanticipated variability. Our approach is architectural style specific and addresses multiflow architectures. The goal of CCDL is to describe contractual specifications and structural constraints of composable components, as guidelines for their composition. CCDL descriptions can be used by automatic composition tools that implement requirements driven composition strategies.

2005

ABSTRACT Composition and adaptation of software components is an important issue in Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE). Building a system from reusable or Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components introduces a set of problems, mainly related to compatibility and communication. On one hand, components may have incompatible interaction behavior (eg, deadlocks, livelocks, incompatible method names, mismatch between the order in which messages are expected/exchanged and so on).