Software Components, Architectures and Reuse
J.UCS Special Issue
Paulo F. Pires
(Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte - UFRN, Brazil
paulo.pires@dimap.ufrn.br)
Flavio Oquendo
(European University of Brittany - UBS/VALORIA, France
flavio.oquendo@univ-ubs.fr)
Ana Paula Terra Bacelo
(Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul - PUCRS, Brazil
ana.bacelo@pucrs.br)
The aim of this special issue is to report the state of research
and practice on the theme of software components, architectures, and
reuse. This special issue is comprised of selected, extended
peer-reviewed papers presented at the 3nd Brazilian Symposium on
Software Components, Architectures, and Reuse (SBCARS 2009), held in
Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, 9-11 September 2009 (http://www.dimap.ufrn.br/sbcars2009/en/index.html),
and papers selected following an open, international Call for
Papers.
The call for this special issue received 11 submissions. Moreover,
well-known researchers in the area were invited to submit papers. Such
submissions were originated from co-authors of 6 countries (Brazil,
France, Mexico, Spain, United Kingdom, and USA).
Each submitted paper was reviewed by at least 3 reviewers. They are
well-known researchers in the area, coming from 12 countries
(Australia, Belgium, Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain,
Sweden, The Netherlands, Tunisia, and USA).
After a thorough reviewing process, 7 submissions were selected to
provide revised versions based on the reviewers
recommendations. These revised versions were then checked by the
corresponding reviewers and 5 high-quality papers were finally
selected to be included in this special issue. This special issue is
composed by these 5 papers as well the 2 invited papers. They present
high-quality research carried out by co-authors from Brazil, France,
Spain, United Kingdom, and USA.
Contents of this Issue
The first paper, entitled "Modeling Quality
Attributes with Aspect-Oriented Architectural Templates" (M. Pinto,
L. Fuentes) presents an approach to formally specify all the different
kinds of dependencies between concerns belonging to the same or to
different functional quality attributes (FQAs). The paper proposes to
use AO-ADL, an aspect-oriented architectural description language, to
specify quality attributes by means of parameterizable, and thus
reusable, architectural patterns.
The paper focuses on quality attributes that: (1) have major
implications on software functionality, requiring the incorporation of
explicit functionality at the architectural level; (2) are complex
enough as to be modeled by a set of related concerns and the
compositions among them, and (3) crosscut domain specific
functionality and are related to more than one component in the
architecture.
The second paper, entitled "Bio-Inspired Mechanisms
for
Coordinating Multiple Instances of a Service Feature in Dynamic
Software Product Lines" (J. Lee, J. White, O. Storz), addresses
the problem of coordinating multiple instance of a service feature
in Dynamic Software Product Lines (DSPL). The paper investigates
the use of principles from self-organization in biological
organisms to provide a decentralized decision-making mechanism to
seamlessly integrate new instances of a service feature without the
need of an omniscient central controller.
The third paper, entitled "Automatically
Checking Feature Model Refactorings" (R. Gheyi, T. Massoni, P. Borba),
addresses the application of refactoring to Feature Models (FMs) to
assist in the evolution of Software Product Lines (SPLs). Feature
Models (FM) are efficient encoded in the Alloy formal specification
language. Based on this encoding, the Alloy Analyzer, which is a tool
used to perform analysis on Alloy models, helps refactoring designers
to automatically and efficiently check whether a FM refactoring is
sound. Moreover, the proposed approach not only tests whether a
transformation is a refactoring, but also shows a counterexample when
it is not a refactoring, which is helpful in finding likely bugs in
the transformation.
The fourth paper, entitled "QoS-based Approach for
Dynamic Web Service Composition" (F. Oliveira Jr., J. Oliveira),
addresses Dynamic Web Services Compositions. It presents a QoS based
approach for service composition that takes into account the
composition overall quality. The proposed approach performs Dynamic
Service Composition taking into account both the semantic description
of a service and its non-functional properties that composes the
quality it delivers. The algorithm to perform this composition
receives as input a request, which consists of the provided input
concepts, required output concepts and QoS constraints, and produces
as output a set of services that together can provide the required
concepts specified in the request.
The fifth paper, entitled "An Aspect-Oriented
Framework for Weaving Domain-Specific Concerns into Component-Based
Systems" (F. Loiret, R. Rouvoy, L. Seinturier, D. Romero,
K. Sénéchal, A. Plšek), presents the Hulotte
framework, which aim at supporting compositional construction and
development of applications that must meet various
extra-functional/domain-specific requirements. The Hulotte framework
is based on Aspect Oriented techniques, employing an incremental
weaving process, combining aspects and components homogeneously from
the application down to the implementation platform. At the
application level, the system is designed as a software architecture
centered on the business logic and is incrementally specialized using
domain specific annotations. At the platform level, annotations are
reified as an aspect, which is implemented as a fine-grained
component-based architecture. Containers are then used as a base
infrastructure, in which domain specific concerns can be injected and
composed to generate dedicated containers, which conform to the
domain-specific requirements of the application.
The sixth paper, entitled "Context-Aware Composition and
Adaptation based on Model Transformation" (J. Cubo, C. Canal,
E. Pimentel), presents an approach to support composition and
adaptation of software components based on model transformation. Such
approach considers mismatch problems that may occur at three
interoperability levels: (1) signature, (2) behavioural, (3) quality
of service and semantic. Signature and behavioral levels are addressed
by means of transition systems. Context-awareness and semantic-based
techniques are used to tackle quality of service and semantic,
respectively, but also both consider the signature level. One
interesting point is that the paper demonstrates that software
composition and adaptation can be of real interest for widely used
implementation platforms such as Window Foundation - WF (.NET), and
can help the developer when building software applications by reusing
software components. The formal foundations of the different steps of
the proposal have been implemented in a set of prototype tools
constituting the framework DAMASCO, which has been validated through
several examples.
The seventh paper, entitled "An Approach for Feature
Modeling of Context-Aware Software Product Line" (P. Fernandes,
C. Werner, E. Teixeira), presents UbiFEX, an approach to support
feature analysis for context-aware software product lines, which
incorporates a modeling notation and a mechanism to verify the
consistency of product configuration regarding context
variations. UbiFEX includes two parts: UbiFEX-Notation, a feature
notation extension developed to explicitly represent context
information in a feature model; and UbiFEX-Simulation, a mechanism
developed to verify the consistency of product configuration regarding
context variations.
Reviewers for this Issue
Ana Paula Bacelo, PUCRS, Brazil
Anarosa Brandao, LTI- USP, Brazil
Antónia Lopes, Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Braga Regina. Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Brazil
Carlos Cuesta, Rey Juan Carlos University, Spain
Cecilia Rubira, UNICAMP, Brazil
Christina Chavez, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil
Claudia Raibulet, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
Claus Pahl, Dublin City University, Ireland
Cláudio Sant'Anna, UFBA, Brazil
Danny Weyns, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
David Levy, University of Sydney, Australia
Eduardo Almeida, UFBA,Brazil
Fabiano Cutigi Ferrari, ICMC-USP, Brazil
Flavia Delicato, UFRN, Brazil
Franklin Ramalho, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande, Brazil
Gledson Elias, UFPB, Brazil
Jesper Andersson, Linnaeus University, Sweden
Katrina Falkner, University of Adelaide, Australia
Laurence Duchien, INRIA and University of Lille, France
Leonardo Murta, UFF, Brazil
Lidia Fuentes, Universidad de Málaga, Spain
Masiero Paulo, Universidade de São Paulo/ICMC, Brazil
Mónica Pinto, University of Málaga, Spain
Mourad Oussalah, LINA Laboratory, France
Nadhmi Miladi, ISIMS, Tunisia
Paris Avgeriou, University of Groningen (RuG), The Netherlands
Paulo Merson, Software Engineering Institute, USA
Régis Fleurquin, University of South Brittany - VALORIA & INRIA, France
Rodrigo Reis, UFPA, Brazil
Rosana Braga, ICMC-USP, Brazil
Toacy Oliveira, COPPE/UFRJ, Brazil
Uirá Kulesza, UFRN, Brazil
Yamine Ait Ameur, University of Poitiers, France
Paulo Pires
Flavio Oquendo
Ana Bacelo
Australia/France/Brazil, November 2010
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