Leveraging component-based software engineering with Fraclet

Component-based software engineering has achieved wide acceptance in the domain of software engineering by improving productivity, reusability and composition. This success has also encouraged the emergence of a plethora of component models. Nevertheless, even if the abstract models of most of lightweight component models are quite similar, their programming models can still differ a lot. This drawback limits the reuse and composition of components implemented using different programming models. The contribution of this article is to introduce Fraclet as a programming model common to several lightweight component models. This programming model is presented as an annotation framework, which allows the developer to annotate the program code with the elements of the abstract component model. Then, using a generative approach, the annotated program code is completed according to the programming model of the component model to be supported by the component runtime environment. This article shows that this annotation framework provides a significant simplification of the program code by removing all dependencies on the component model interfaces. These benefits are illustrated with the Fractal and OpenCOM component models.