Compositional structured component model: handling selective functional composition

Software component technology has been promoted as an innovative means to tackle the issues of software reuse, software quality and, software development complexity. Several component models (CORBA, .Net, JavaBeans) have been introduced, yet certain issues and limitations inherent to components still need to be addressed. As software components with hosts of functionalities tend to be coarse to large-grained in size and since the set of functionalities required by an application varies according to the particular application context, an excessive number of unwanted functionalities might be generated by such components within the application. We present the compositional structured component model (CSCM) designed to handle the issue of unwanted component functionalities and to provide a flexible approach for easier customization, adaptation, and reuse. The CSCM model is designed to handle this issue via component functional composition using metadata composition instances, which allow selective composition of a component´s required functionalities.