Year: 1996
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Software components are often described by interfaces organised as sets of externally visible elements, such as signatures of callable functions and procedures, or types of messages and signals accepted by the component.While it is a common practice to construct larger components by composing smaller ones and abstracting their function, interfaces of composite, higher-level components are still described as sets of function signatures or message types.This situation indicates a granularity mismatch between the level of abstraction of components and their interfaces.We believe that just as components are structured as compositions of lower level components, interfaces must be structured as compositions of lower level interfaces.In this paper we present an approach to structuring and describing interfaces of large software components.We model interfaces as collections of interface objects that have state and may exhibit non-trivial behaviour.We also compose basic interface elements such as functions signatures and event types into composite elements that we call interactions.Interactions correspond to meaningful, from the component user point of view, services provided by interface objects.
Authors: Alexander Ran, Jianli Xu
Institution: Nokia (Finland)
Language: English
Subfield: Software
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2294170429