OSGi component substitutability using enhanced ENT metamodel implementation: technical report no. DCSE/TR-2006-05

Software components can be found in both enterprise-wide and mobile/embedded solutions. Components are mutually linked and dependent, but encapsulated as black boxes and developed independently. They can be replac ed without affecting the rest of the application. This advantage requires careful and complex compatibility checks between both component versions though, otherwise the whole application can be broken down. In this paper we present and describe the implementation of the ENT metamodel and the ENT based component comparison algorithm. This algorithm is used in the practical case: OSGi Release 4 components are being compared. On the basis of the change, version identifiers of the newer component are assigned