PacoSuite: Improving visual component-based software development

PacoSuite is a visual component composition environment that extends the current state-of-the art visual tools. PacoSuite introduces composition patterns as first class and reusable connectors between components. Assembling an application is as simple as visually dragging components in a composition pattern. The drag and drop action is refused when the component is detected to be incompatible with the composition pattern. When all the component roles are filled, the composition is checked as a whole and glue-code that translates syntactical incompatibilites between the components is generated automatically. This research has been going on for a couple of years at our lab and has been finalized in Bart Wydaeghe's PhD.

Recently the concept of a composition adapter has been introduced to be able to capture concerns that do not fit in the current PacoSuite artifacts. A composition adapter describes adaptations of a composition pattern independently of a specific API. A regular composition adapter is however limited to concerns that influence the external behavior of the components by re-routing or filtering their messages. Therefore, we propose to use an aspect-oriented programming (AOP) langange as an implementation of a composition adapter. Current AOP languages are however not very well suited for the component-based world. For this reason we introduce our own AOP language called JAsCo. An extented version of a composition adapter, called an invasive composition adapter, has an implementation in the JAsCo language and is able to express more involved concerns than mere filtering or re-routing. Furthermore, an invasive composition adapter can be visually applied on a given composition pattern and the JAsCo tools are executed transparently for the user.

For more information about the JAsCo language and the motivation why we introduced JAsCo, we refer to the JAsCo website.

Getting started with PacoSuite:
To get started with PacoSuite, we recommend you to read some papers first to become familiar with the PacoSuite concepts. The following two papers should get you started. If you need more background information, we refer to the publications section.

Vanderperren, W. and Wydaeghe, B. Towards a New Component Composition Process. In Proceedings of ECBS 2001 Int Conf. Washington, USA, April 2001. [Download paper]

Vanderperren, W. Localizing crosscutting concerns in visual component based development.In proceedings of Software Engineering Research and Practice (SERP) international conference. Las Vegas, USA, june 2002.

[download paper]

Afterwards you could install the PacoSuite tool and follow some of the tutorials in the documentation section.

Have fun!