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Abstract
Components come in a variety of formats, designs and
implementations. Components can be designed to work together or their designs
can be totally incompatible. This influences greatly the amount and kind of
composition work that is to be done. In this work, we build on the work of
architectural description languages to improve current visual component
composition environments. This is done using the concept of composition patterns. A
composition pattern describes an interaction between a set of roles using an
extended sequence chart. It serves as a bridge between the design and the
implementation. We further propose a component documentation using the same kind
of extended sequence charts. The concept of composition patterns lifts the
abstraction level of current composition techniques to the same level of the
components. I.e. composition patterns are first class objects that can be
defined, stored and reused independently of the components. We further develop and implement algorithms to perform
automatic compatibility checking based on finite automata theory. We also
developed tool support that gives feedback in case of a mismatch. This includes
a visualization of the matching process and the generation of adaptors. The
latter is a new technique based on the adaptive programming library and the
results of Reussner. Finally, we describe how glue code can be generated that
constrains incompatible and unwanted behaviors of components based on the
constraints specified by the composition pattern. This glue code allows us to
use a more flexible compatibility check that leads to more generic and more
reusable composition patterns. We implemented these checks and mismatch feedback in our
prototype of a visual component composition environment. This tool shows how the
formal checks can be hidden for the user to provide an intuitive and easy to use
component composition process. We demonstrate this by showing how a small exam
construction kit is provided and used in this prototype. This work is mainly useful to build very flexible
construction kits. It allows the developers of such a kit to provide default
composition patterns together with their set of components without touching the
ability of the users of these construction kits to build very complex
compositions that were not foreseen by the developers. Download full text
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2003-02-19 15:01:44 - Wim Vanderperren Latest build of the PacoSuite tool-suite can be found in the download section. 2003-02-19 15:01:19 - Wim Vanderperren PacoSuite Website online. |
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