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Smart compositional wrappers

Posted on:2003-01-07Degree:Ph.DType:Dissertation
University:University of Central FloridaCandidate:Al-Hatali, Saleh Matar MohammedFull Text:PDF
GTID:1468390011979530Subject:Computer Science
Abstract/Summary:
Software system developers often hope to shorten development time, reduce development costs, provide more software functionality, and improve software usability by assembling systems from pre-built software components. However, users need guide lines for describing the desired component characteristics and the objectives and constraints of target systems. Component suppliers need guidelines for describing the characteristics and behavior of components they can provide. Processes and tools are needed to support increased process automation.; This dissertation addresses these issues by presenting a new “smart compositional wrapper” approach to specification, acquisition, and integration of software components. In contrast to other approaches that wrap individual components, a smart compositional wrapper encases an entire set of components and provides “smart features” to support management and automatic upgrade and maintenance of compositional wrappers and encased components. Three contributions are provided to support implementation of smart compositional wrappers. First, two new formal specification languages are developed. Component Specification Language (CSL) and Wrapper Specification Language (WSL), respectively, allow component suppliers and system integrators to describe off-the-shelf components and target systems. Second, a complete composition process is described that can be used to build compositional wrappers from pre-built components. Finally, the design and implementation of a smart wrapper generator is described. The wrapper generator is a software tool that takes a WSL specification for a compositional wrapper and uses the composition process to search and collect components whose specifications conform to CSL, acquire such components, configure them, wire them together, and generate the glue code to wire component interfaces and implement required smart features.; The smart compositional wrapper approach provides improved opportunities for automation of many of the process activities due to the variety and simplicity of the WSL and CSL constructs, the well-defined stages and activities of the composition process, and the powerful built-in capabilities of the wrapper generator. A return-on-investment analysis, performed using data from actual projects reported in the published software engineering literature, demonstrated that this approach can be cost-effective. Algorithms, code snippets, example specifications, and a working prototype to demonstrate the parsing of WSL and CSL specifications are provided to illustrate the utility of this approach.*; *This dissertation is compound (contains both a paper copy and CD as part of the dissertation). The CD requires the following system requirement: Internet browser.
Keywords/Search Tags:Smart compositional, System, Software, Components, WSL, CSL
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