Extending CSCM to support Interface Versioning

Abstract

Software component has been a main stream technology used to tackle issues such as software reuse, software quality and, software development complexity. In spite of the proliferation of component models (CORBA, .Net, JavaBeans), certain issues and limitations inherent to components are still not addressed adequately. For instance, composing software components especially those provided by different suppliers may result in faulty behavior. This behavior might be the result of incompatibilities between aging components and/or freshly released components and their respective interfaces. This paper, present an approach to tackle component interface incompatibilities via the use of a component and interface versioning scheme. This approach is designed as an extension to the compositional structured component model (CSCM), an ongoing research project. The implementation of this extension makes use of code annotations to provide interface versioning information useful in detecting interface incompatibilities