An Experiment in Component Adaptation

Adapting existing code to include additional functional- ity or behavior is a common theme in software engineer- ing As component-based software engineering achieve greater widespread use, there will be a distinct need to support such third-party adaptation This paper de- scribes several component adaptation techniques from the literature We evaluate these adaptation techniques by comparing their use in adapting an existing compo- nent in a sample application Our experience leads us to a better understanding of the similarities and differ- ences between existing adaptation techniques and sug- gests principles for component designers and adapter