Separating concerns in a high-level component-based context

AbstractBuilding 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 component-based 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