A refactoring-based tool for software component adaptation

Abstract

Adapting software components usable by a particular application is a crucial issue in software component based technology. In fact, software components can be used in contexts that can be different from the context assumptions made by the component designers. We present in this paper a tool aiming at adapting software component structure. Among the motivations of this kind of adaptation, we note its possible application to prepare a flexible deployment of software components according to the available resources (CPU, memory). Our adaptation process is based on refactoring and fragmentation of component source code. To support this structural adaptation technique, we developed an adaptation process which we have experimented using the Java framework of the Fractal component model