Towards a new component composition process

Abstract

Component-based development is considered to be a promising technology to cure the software crisis. However, until now, designing and developing component-based applications has turned out to be very hard. Current component-based development not only involves a component configuration phase, but also writing a lot of glue code. Much of the existing glue code in current systems is written to "hack" components together instead of following a careful design. In this paper, we introduce a component composition methodology based on the concept of composition patterns. A composition pattern describes an interaction between a set of roles rising an extended sequence chart. It serves as a bridge between the design and the implementation. We further propose a component documentation and a set of algorithms bused on finite automata theory to perform an automatic compatibility check and glue-code generation to support this methodology.