Toward a design handbook for integrating software components

Abstract

In component-based software development the identification and proper management of interconnections among the pieces of a system becomes a central concern. Nevertheless, today's programming languages and tools still place an emphasis on representing components, leaving the description and management of component interdependencies implicit, or distributed among the components. The paper proposes a new perspective for designing software which elevates the representation and management of software component interdependencies to a distinct design problem, orthogonal to that of representing and implementing the core functional pieces of an application. The perspective is based on a taxonomy of common software interconnection dependencies and sets of alternative protocols for managing them. The taxonomy can form the basis of design handbooks for guiding the systematic solution of component integration problems. SYNTHESIS, a prototype software application development tool based on that perspective, has been developed and successfully used to minimize the manual effort required to integrate independently developed components into new applications.