Superimposition: A Language-Independent Approach to Software Composition

Superimposition is a composition technique that has been applied successfully in several areas of software development. In order to unify several languages and tools that rely on superimposition, we present an underlying language-independent model that is based on feature structure trees (FSTs). Furthermore, we offer a tool, called FSTComposer, that composes software components represented by FSTs. Currently, the tool supports the composition of components written in Java, Jak, XML, and plain text. Three nontrivial case studies demonstrate the practicality of our approach.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SOCO
• Authors: Sven Apel, Christian Lengauer
• Keywords: Composition Technique, SOCO 2008, Software Engineering, Superimposition, Tool