Organizing, and documenting component-oriented toolkits

Abstract

<p>Component-Oriented Software Technology started to emerge during the last few years. The purpose is to make it easier to build new applications from existing components that can be obtained from Component-Oriented Toolkits (CO-Toolkits for short). Experience shows that CO-Toolkits are hard to understand and use. Therefore, developers would write their own code from scratch using programming languages that they know instead of using components from such CO-Toolkits. In this research, we have used ADAPTIVE Communication Environment (ACE for short)--as an example of CO-Toolkits--to establish a set of initial assumptions for good design practice from the perspective of their file structures, design and implementation, and documentation of CO-Toolkits. Then (i) we show how to formalize rules for good file structures, design and implementation, and documentation that are based on these initial assumptions, (ii) we show that checking tools can be built based on these formalized rules, and then (iii) we demonstrate that such tools can be used to check existing CO-Toolkits code and report any rule violations back to developers.</p>