Technical reports
Black-box composition of mismatched software components
December 2013, 251 pages
This technical report is based on a dissertation submitted December 2010 by the author for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the University of Cambridge, Christ’s College.
DOI: 10.48456/tr-845
Abstract
Software is expensive to develop. Much of that expense can be blamed on difficulties in combining, integrating or re-using separate pieces of software, and in maintaining such compositions. Conventional development tools approach composition in an inherently narrow way. Specifically, they insist on modules that are plug-compatible, meaning that they must fit together down to a very fine level of detail, and that are homogeneous, meaning that they must be written according to the same conventions and (usually) in the same programming language. In summary, modules must have matched interfaces to compose. These inflexibilities, in turn, motivate more software creation and concomitant expense: they make programming approaches based on integration and re-use unduly expensive. This means that reimplementation from scratch is often chosen in preference to adaptation of existing implementations.
This dissertation presents several contributions towards lessening this problem. It centres on the design of a new special-purpose programming language, called Cake. This language is specialised to the task of describing how components having mismatched interfaces (i.e., not plug-compatible, and perhaps not homogeneous) may be adapted so that they compose as required. It is a language significantly more effective at capturing relationships between mismatched interfaces than general-purpose programming languages. Firstly, we outline the language’s design, which centres on reconciling interface differences in the form high-level correspondence rules which relate different interfaces. Secondly, since Cake is designed to be a practical tool which can be a convenient and easily-integrated tool under existing development practices, we describe an implementation of Cake in detail and explain how it achieves this integration. Thirdly, we evaluate Cake on real tasks: by applying it to integration tasks which have already been performed under conventional approaches, we draw meaningful comparisons demonstrating a smaller (quantitative) size of required code and lesser (qualitative) complexity of the code that is required. Finally, Cake applies to a wide range of input components; we sketch extensions to Cake which render it capable of composing components that are heterogeneous with respect to a carefully identified set of stylistic concerns which we describe in detail.
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BibTeX record
@TechReport{UCAM-CL-TR-845,
author = {Kell, Stephen},
title = {{Black-box composition of mismatched software components}},
year = 2013,
month = dec,
url = {https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-845.pdf},
institution = {University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory},
doi = {10.48456/tr-845},
number = {UCAM-CL-TR-845}
}