A Comparison of Two Java Component Extraction Approaches

Remodularization aims improving software modularity and making more explicit component and architectural information. In order to remodularize their applications, maintainers need tools enabling component and architecture recovery. There exist several approaches for the extraction of component information from Java source code. Only few of them provide automatic support taking into account modern component based concepts such as composite component. These approaches are either based on sets of metrics or they rely on a semantic method. In this paper we compare these two approaches considering SoMoX and JCE as representative instances of them. Our contribution shows that these tools are not based on the same component model and they are not devoted to the same remodularization activities. We identify several issues in order to improve the studied approaches and their tool support.