Extracting Interactions in Component-Based Systems

Monitoring, analyzing, and understanding component-based enterprise software systems are challenging tasks. These tasks are essential to solving and preventing performance and quality problems. Obtaining component-level interactions that show the relationships between different software entities is a necessary prerequisite for such efforts. This paper focuses on component-based Java applications, currently widely used by the industry. They pose specific challenges while raising interesting opportunities for component-level interaction extraction tools. We present a range of representative approaches for dynamically obtaining and using component interactions. For each approach, we detail the needs it addresses and the technical requirements for building an implementation of the approach. We also take a critical look at the different available implementations of the various techniques presented. We give performance and functional considerations and contrast them against each other by outlining their relative advantages and disadvantages. Based on this data, developers and system integrators can better understand the current state of the art and the implications of choosing or implementing different dynamic interaction extraction techniques.