| Many approaches to reducing the cost, complexity and development time of software applications have been explored within the discipline of Software Engineering. Several language-based techniques, most recently the Object Oriented paradigm, have been developed to facilitate the reuse of code. Even when these techniques employ the notion of components, they do so only in a limited way within the language's environment at development time.; Recently, the study of Software Architecture has emerged to provide language support called an Architecture Definition Language (ADL), for building configurations of components into runable systems.; In this thesis we develop a formal representation of software component architecture concepts where none currently exists. We use this representation to derive a specification for a unique, XML-based ADL. Finally, we specify and develop a prototype engine that uses this ADL for the automated assembly of software applications. |
