The composition of new applications from pre-existing parts has been one of the central notions in software reuse and component-based development for many years. Recent advances with component retrieval technologies and dynamically reconfiguring systems have brought the automated integration of components into systems into the focus of research. Even when a component offers all functionality needed by the using environment there is often a host of “syntactic obstacles” and to date there is no general solution available that can automatically address syntactic mismatches between components and their clients. In this paper we present an approach that automatically creates all syntactically feasible adapters for a given component-client constellation and selects the semantically correct one with the help of “ordinary” unit test cases. After explaining how our approach works algorithmically, we demonstrate that our prototype implementation is already able to solve a large fraction of the adaptation challenges previously identified in the literature fully automatically.
['Oliver Hummel', 'Colin Atkinson']
Automated creation and assessment of component adapters with test cases