Extending Component Composition Using Model Driven and Aspect-Oriented Techniques

Abstract

Component-based software engineering is an interesting and emerging discipline focused on reuse plug&play pieces of software. However, these pieces of software are distributed by the companies as binary units of composition. So, nowadays the system requirements are continuously evolving, as a consequence the component acquired normally need to require be adapted to these new requirements. However, once a binary component is ready to market, its contract cannot be changed in order to be adapted to new context or new requirements. In this sense, new modularization mechanisms like aspect-orientation can facilitate the software systems adaptation and evolution. Besides, this kind of modularization joined to model driven techniques can help to obviate contracts and weave new behavior to an already developed system. In this paper, a component composition mechanism based on aspect-oriented and model-driven techniques is presented, extending the typical composition based on interfaces and events. To do this, the components and their relations (basic relations –provides, uses– and extended relations described using aspect-oriented techniques) are modeled using UML. Then, using our approach based on model-driven development (MDD) the system modeled is transformed to obtain a component based system based on a specific component model. This work has been developed using Corba Component Model (CCM) as the component model1.