In traditional Software Engineering approaches, an application is described as a composite entity containing all its components. This approach is no longer relevant in modern Software Engineering, at least when developing service-based applications where some components (services) are selected very late during the development process or even "discovered" at execution. This new context requires describing an application in a more flexible way, leaving room for delayed selection. In turn, if component selection can be performed all along the life-cycle, an application description must explicitly include the application requirements and goals and the system must at least ensure that the selections satisfy the application description. In this work, we propose a concept of composite addressing the needs of the advanced and flexible service-based applications, automating component selection and building composites satisfying the application description and enforcing minimality, com...
Jacky Estublier, Idrissa A. Dieng, Eric Simon, Ger