Current models for software components have made component-based software engineering practical. However, these models are limited in the sense that their support for the specification of software components primarily deals with syntactic issues. To facilitate interoperability and proper use of software components, more comprehensive specification of these components is required. In this paper,...

Groupware is evolutionary and difficult to develop and maintain. Thus, its code becomes unstructured and difficult to evolve. In this paper, a groupware development approach based on components organized according to the 3C collaboration model is proposed. In this model, collaboration is analyzed based on communication, coordination and cooperation. Collaboration requirements, analyzed based on...

Designers and developers try to build stable and multi-domain software components while the software infrastructure they use keeps evolving and thus being heterogeneous. This can be called “the business and technical life cycles mismatch”. The paper shows where and why middleware technologies fail to solve the business and technical life cycles mismatch. Then it demonstrates that lots of the ni...

Modern software systems become increasingly complex as they are expected to support a large variety of different functions. We need to create more software in a shorter time, and without compromising the quality of the software. In order to build such systems efficiently, a compositional approach is required. This entails some formal technique for analysis and reasoning on local component prope...

Modern middleware platforms provide the applications deployed on top of them with facilities for their adaptation. However, the level of adaptation support provided by the state-of-the-art middleware solutions is often limited to dynamically loading and off-loading of software components. Therefore, it is left to the application developers to handle the details of change such that the system’s ...

The problem of adapting heterogeneous software components that present mismatching interaction behaviours is one of the crucial problems in Component-Based Software Engineering. The aim of this paper is to contribute to setting a theoretical foundation for software adaptation. A formal analysis of adaptor specifications is presented, and their usage to feature different forms of flexible adapta...

Orchestrating software components, often independently supplied, has assumed a central role in software construction. Actually, as relevant as components themselves, are the ways in which they can be put together to interact and cooperate in order to achieve some common goal. Such is the role of so-called software connectors: external coordination devices which ensure both the flow of data and ...

The increasing sophistication of today's information era poses certain challenges to traditional information technology (IT) systems. Agent-based software technology is rapidly evolving to meet the demands of this new information era. However, before agent-based solutions can be routinely and successfully exploited in real world problems, first, certain fundamental research and software enginee...

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Component adaptation is widely recognised to be one of the crucial problems in Component-Based Software Engineering. The previous work of the author has addressed the development of a formal methodology for adapting at run-time components with mismatching interaction behaviour. In this position paper, I present a brief overview of the methodology proposed, show its relations with some other sig...