COCO: Composition Model and Composition Model Implementation

The success of component-based development has been impeded by interoperability concerns, including component model, semantic, syntactic, design and platform incompatibilities, that often come into play when composing two or more independently developed components. In this paper we propose a CoCo composition model that elevates compositions to first class citizenship status. The model defines a standard for describing the composition of components transparent to any underlying incompatibilities between the collaborating components. We also present a CoCo composition model implementation that provides the required support to describe and subsequently execute the composition to produce an executable application. We advocate the use of XML Schemas as a mechanism to support this composition model. To support the composition model implementation we provide (1) a taxonomy of primitive composition operators to describe the connection between components; (2) XML documents as a description language for the compositions; and (3) the development of a set of deployment plugins that address any incompatibilities and enable the generation of the model-specific and platform-specific applications.