Leveraging Component-Oriented Programming with Attribute-Oriented Programming

Component-oriented programming has achieved wide acceptance in the domain of software engineering by improving productivity, reusability and composition. This success has also encouraged the emergence of a plethora of component models. Nevertheless, even if the abstract models of existing component models are quite similar, their programming models can differ a lot. This drawback limits the reuse and composition of components implemented using different programming models. The contribution of this paper is to introduce a reification of an abstract model common to several component models. This reification is presented as an annotation framework, which allows the developer to annotate the program code with the elements of the abstract component model. Then, using a generator, the annotated program code is completed according to the programming model of the component model to be supported by the component runtime environment. This paper shows that this annotation framework provides a significant simplification of the program code by removing all dependencies on the component model interfaces. These benefits are illustrated with the OpenCOM and Fractal component models.