A Model for Software Libraries

Software libraries have long been an integral element of software development. Recent advances in areas such as software product lines and extensibility mechanisms have focused renewed attention on collections, particularly heterogeneous collections, of software artifacts. The contribution of this paper is to propose a model for a software library. Our work creates a framework that is abstract enough to encompass many kinds of software libraries beyond those used for the sort of programming constructs normally considered. This allows quite disparate collections to be understood within the same framework. Notable to our work is a discussion of the role of context and deployment to libraries. A comparison of our model to existing models is provided. A number of different types of libraries are analyzed to demonstrate the power of our model and to show how it leads to better understanding of several types of software collections.