XCompose: An XML-Based Component Composition Framework

With increasing number of components now available on the market, research and industry emphasis has shifted from the development of component models to the devel-opment of languages and other techniques to enable the composition of pre-fabricated components. We believe that frameworks for composition of components must be flexible, extensible, re-usable and offer some guarantees on the correctness of the composition. We present in this position statement a unique framework that is based on the simple hypothesis that complex component composi-tions can always be broken down into a sequence of sim-ple composition operators. Based on this hypothesis, we define a set of primitive composition operators, show how primitives composition operators can be effectively com-bined to formulate large, more complex component com-position. In this paper, we discuss the requirements for a framework that is based on the paradigm “applications components composition language ” where “compo-sition language composition operators glue logic”. In particular we examine the requirements for the com-position operators and the language. We also present an overview of XCompose, an XML-based component com-position framework, currently underway at UMass Low-ell