The evolution of automated component-based software development tools: From structural synthesis of programs to behavioral types

Abstract

The software composition using high-granularity entities nowadays is a common practice. The process of software composition is supported by various CASE tools. First tools were made on the basis of very simple formalisms (e.g. intuitionistic propositional logic). During the years the tools evolved to more efficient ones, which are able to deal with concurrency, multiparty sessions and other advanced aspects of distributed software. Such tools often are based on the behavioral types (BT). This paper presents 3 logically related tools: CoCoViLa, SoCoSys and BSynth in order to expose such evolution. CoCoViLa and (partially) SoCoSys are based on the Structural Synthesis of Programs method while BSynth tool is more related to behavioral types. The focus of this paper is more on the BSynth, because it implements the Evolutionary prediction algorithm, enabling to predict what components are missing in initial repository. The possible future trends of automated component-based software development and its relation to selected tools are discussed also.