An evaluation of component based software design approaches

CCGRID 2004. IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (Chicago, USA, 19-22 April, 2004).Descrizione sintetica del prodotto: There is growing attention for a component-oriented software design of Grid applications. Within this framework, applications are built by assembling together independently developed-software components. A component is a software unit with a clearly defined interface and explicit dependencies. It is designed to be integrated with other components, but independently from them. Unix filters and the pipe composition model, the first successful component-oriented model, allowed more complex applications to be developed quickly out of powerful tools. Today, to face the growing complexity of modern programming, two main approaches are used for component development and publication. The first is based on an Interface Description Language (IDL), the second is typical, for instance, of Java and is based on introspection and design patterns. In this work, we discuss these two approaches in term of ease-of-use, flexibility and performance. In our opinion, the second approach has a faster learning curve, lower programming cost, and it is more suitable to automation. Performance is a weak point in both approaches. We believe a more flexible and modern approach to components is needed: tools need to be developed that automatically extract signature from existing code; with it, bridging code to a framework should be automatically instantiated with ad-hoc conversion. We discuss state-of-the-art results in this area, and we highlight some important research directions.