Separating concerns in a high-level component-based context

Building on the work of architectural description languages and aspect-oriented programming, we try to improve current visual component composition environments. In our research, we introduced the concept of a composition pattern to lift the abstraction level of current visual wiring to a protocol rather than event/action pairs. This work is summarised briefly in this paper before we present the main topic: composition adapters. In componentbased development, the components are the natural unit of modularisation. However, there will always be concerns that cannot be confined to one single component. We introduce composition adapters as a means to localize crosscutting concerns in a separate entity. We use state information deduced from the composition pattern to weave composition adapters into the component-based application. In this paper, we explain how composition adapters are checked on their compatibility with the composition pattern and how this state based insertion of composition adapters is done.