Runtime Support for Advanced Component Concepts

Component-based development has become a recognized technique for building large scale distributed applications. Although the maturity of this technique, there appears to be quite a significant gap between (a) component systems that are rich in advanced features (e.g., component nesting, software connectors, versioning, dynamic architectures), but which have typically only poor or even no runtime support, and (b) component systems with a solid runtime support, but which typically possess only a limited set of the advanced features. In our opinion, this is mainly due to the difficulties that arise when trying to give proper semantics to the features and reify them in development tools and an runtime platform. In this paper, we describe the implementation of the runtime environment for the SOFA 2.0 component model. In particular, we focus on the runtime support of the advanced features mentioned above. The described issues and the solution are not specific only to SOFA 2.0, but they are general and applicable to any other component system aiming at addressing such features.