PACOSUITE: Component Composition Based on Composition Patterns and Usage Scenarios

Components come in a variety of formats, designs and implementations. Components can be designed to work together or their designs can be totally incompatible. This influences greatly the amount and kind of composition work that is to be done. In this work, we build on the work of architectural description languages to improve current visual component composition environments. This is done using the concept of composition patterns. A composition pattern describes an interaction between a set of roles using an extended sequence chart. It serves as a bridge between the design and the implementation. We further propose a component documentation using the same kind of extended sequence charts. The concept of composition patterns lifts the abstraction level of current composition techniques to the same level of the components. I.e. composition patterns are first class objects that can be defined, stored and reused independently of the components. We further develop and implement algorithms to perform automatic compatibility checking based on finite automata theory. We also developed tool support that give