Improving Composition Support with Lightweight Metadata-Based Extensions of Component Models

Software systems that rely on the component paradigm build new components by assembling existing prefabricated components. Most currently available IDEs support graphical components such as .NET controls or JavaBeans for building GUI applications. Even though all those IDEs support arrangement and layout of those desktop components, composition support is rather limited. None of the most important composition environments support built-in validation of composition for .NET components or JavaBeans no further than type checking. Enhanced component models and composition environments on the other hand are not widely adopted and require incompatible components that may not be reused in most IDEs. Our approach avoids these problems with lightweight extensions of existing component models with metadata attributes. We use metadata attributes to assign additional information to components. Subsequently, we enhance the built-in composition facilities of the component model and the composition e...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SOCO
• Authors: Johann Oberleitner, Michael Fischer
• Keywords: Component Model, Composition Environment, Metadata Attributes, SOCO 2005