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]