Enhanced component interfaces to support dynamic adaption and extension

Current component systems offer the possibility to integrate different enterprise systems, e.g., by wrapping legacy components or integrating several object protocols such as RMI, Corba-IIOP, etc. A disadvantage of todays component systems is that the interface descriptions of their component model do not give alone sufficient information to deploy a component correctly and reliably. Therefore the definition of new interface models, which are enhanced by (semantic) applicability information play an important role in enterprise application integration. We describe a new model of software component interfaces, using an extension of finite state machines to describe the protocol to use a component´s offered services, and the sequences of calls to external services the component requires to fulfil its offered services. Our model concentrates on protocol issues of interoperability. We present a description of our new interface model and present the algorithms for integration checking, automatic adaption and dynamic extension. These algorithms are implemented in our CoCoNut/J-prototype.