SOFA 2.0:: Balancing advanced features in a hierarchical component model

Component-based software engineering is a powerful paradigm for building large applications. However, our experience with building application of components is that the existing advanced component models (such as those offering component nesting, behavior specification and checking, dynamic reconfiguration to some extent, etc) are subject to a lot of limitations and issues which prevent them from being accepted more widely (by industry in particular). We claim that these issues are specifically related to (a) the lack of support for dynamic reconfigurations of hierarchical architectures, (b) poor support for modeling and extendibility of the control part of a component, and (c) the lack of support for different communication styles applied in inter-component communication. In this paper, we show how these problems can be addressed and present an advanced component system SOFA 2.0 as a proof of the concept. This system is based on its predecessor SOFA, but it incorporates a number of enhancements and improvements.