An Architectural Pattern for Dynamic Component Integration

Abstract

The continuing increase of interest in Component-based Software Engineering (CBSE) signifies the emergence of a new development trend within the software industry. CBSE deals with the usage of reusable software components to provide complex integrated solutions at shorter development time and minimum cost. This engineering approach emphasizes the identification, selection, evaluation, procurement, integration, and evolution of reusable components for constructing complex and large-scale software solutions. Component-based development approach has a great potential for significantly reducing the cost and time to market of large-scale and complex software systems, improving system maintainability and flexibility. However the usage of components imposes some problems in the development process. Especially, the complexity of the integration process is increased due to the black box nature of the products. Integration is further influenced by problems due to architectural mismatches, component incompatibility etc. Apart from these general static integration problems, necessity for intelligent services and context aware computing paves way for the dynamic integration of components. Patterns have promising benefits in solving software design problems and their benefits have been realized in the design of component integration also. Patterns exist in different levels. Architectural patterns provide the overall structure of a system; design patterns deal with localized design choices; Idioms define patterns of usage within a particular language. Design patterns express proven techniques making it possible to reuse successful designs and provide a common vocabulary to share design descriptions. Architectural patterns cover a wider realm, specifying system-wide structural properties for an application, and impacting on subsystem architecture. This report presents the study of literature related to patterns and its application in the design of component-based systems. An Architectural pattern has been proposed in this report, for the design of a component-based system that dynamically integrates components. The dynamism is achieved using a service model.