EX-MAN Component Model for Component-Based Software Construction

In software engineering, composition is the way to reuse existing work. In component-based development (CBD), a number of component models are defined with an emphasis on composition mechanisms for components. With respect to components, current component models can be categorised into three main groups where components are: (i) objects, (ii) architectural units and (iii) encapsulated components. This paper presents a comparison of system construction in these three categories of component models and concludes selecting the X-MAN component model (X-MAN) from the third category for its edge over other models because of its exogenous composition connectors. However, because of the limitations of X-MAN, the use of this component model at a wider scale is hindered. In this paper, we propose extended X-MAN component model (EX-MAN) which addresses the limitations of X-MAN. To demonstrate the EX-MAN semantics for system construction, we have developed a tool exogenous composition framework (ECF). We have described the concepts used in our work using a trivial bank example. To evaluate the feasibility of EX-MAN for system construction, using ECF (a related tool we have developed), we constructed the trivial bank example and also a more complex system, CoCoME, example.