A new method for component reuse

Achieving software reuse is a fundamental problem in software engineering. Component-based development (CBD) is widely accepted as a promising approach for software reuse. Current methods for component reuse concentrate primarily on the component consumer perspective, which are lack of the potential for component evolution itself. This paper proposes two complementary approaches to reusing existing components: binary class-level inheritance and feature composition. To meet variability requirements, a new component can be derived across component module from an old component. Furthermore, to narrow the gulf between the user and the developer perspectives, the system features are decomposed into a set of independent feature components that can be plugged into running object. The design and implementation method on component platform is presented. At last, this paper introduces the graphic user interface and mobile telephone projects development experiments that show the two approaches contribute to reuse.