1Declarative Descriptions of Component Models as a Generic Support for Software Composition

Component Models define standards for describing components and mechanisms to build applications out of components. These standards are specified using natural language and embedded into composition tools, which prevents adaptation of the model and reuse of the tool. We address the problem of describing mechanisms for composition in such a way that they are explicit and become independent from the composition tool. This allows to build generic tools capable of handling different component models. We propose the use of logic meta-programming to describe the components, describe the protocols for composition and the code that realizes them, specify an application built up from connected components and generate the code for the application. Experiments based on a prototype tool show that these descriptions make the protocols and the tool independent.