The Research Of COTS Software And COTS Software Wrapper

The research of COTS, Commercial Off-The-Shelf software is becoming a 'hot point' in software engineering area. However, many results have been done in foreign countries were laid on levels of empirical, case or model studies. It seems weaker in China.In this paper scope of COTS software is expanded. It includes a variety of existing executable software entities, and also includes software documents and databases that may be accessed by COTS software. The other forms of COTS software may be Military Off-The-Shelf software, Government Off-The-Shelf software or any of legacy software and application systems. The COTS-Based Software Engineering emphasizes to assemble software without any modification into another target system, i.e. an assembling manner of development.This paper presents first COTS software properties, then presents some further studies about the methodology to assemble COTS software to build a new software system. The methodology combined with two steps: making wrapper of the COTS software first and then cohering them together into a new product. From software architecture viewpoint, the COTS software to be assembled must possess consistent architecture. Therefore the wrappers and coherers of COTS software must also keep their consistency in an identical architecture. From the varieties of requirements of using COTS software, the paper also analyzes and evaluates some wrapping and deploying models under several typical environments where COTS software been used. Finally, the paper provides a new COTS assembling method include the design and implement of wrapper interface that may add and shield some functions to adapt new needs, and component technology that transforms COTS software with wrapper interface into the standard components in the reusable component library. In addition, some common functions of the COTS wrapper were drawn and integrated them into the COM components that help COTS users to easily realize the wrapper interfaces. A small program may help COTS users to obtain the COTS software information in running time so that they may easily make the wrapper interfaces. The program reused COM components presented in this paper.