Advances in component-oriented programming

WCOP 2006 is the eleventh event in a series of highly successful workshops, which took place in conjunction with every ECOOP since 1996. Component oriented programming (COP) has been described as the natural extension of object-oriented programming to the realm of independently extensible systems. Several important approaches have emerged over the recent years, including component technology standards, such as CORBA/CCM, COM/COM+, J2EE/EJB, and .NET, but also the increasing appreciation of software architecture for component-based systems, and the consequent effects on organizational processes and structures as well as the software development business as a whole. COP aims at producing software components for a component market and for late composition. Composers are third parties, possibly the end users, who are not able or willing to change components. This requires standards to allow independently created components to interoperate, and specifications that put the composer into the position to decide what can be composed under which conditions. On these grounds, WCOP\u2796 led to the following definition: "A component is a unit of composition with contractually specified interfaces and explicit context dependencies only. Components can be deployed independently and are subject to composition by third parties." After WCOP\u2796 focused on the fundamental terminology of COP, the subsequent workshops expanded into the many related facets of component software. WCOP 2006 emphasizes reasons for using components beyond reuse. While considering software components as a technical means to increase software reuse, other reasons for investing into component technology tend to be overseen. For example, components play an important role in frameworks and product-lines to enable configurability (even if no component is reused). Another role of components beyond reuse is to increase the predictability of the properties of a system. The use of components as contractually specified building blocks restricts the degrees of freedom during software development compared to classic line-by-line programming. This restriction is beneficial for the predictability of system properties. For an engineering approach to software design, it is important to understand the implications of design decisions on a system\u27s properties. Therefore, approaches to evaluate and predict properties of systems by analyzing its components and its architecture are of high interest. To strengthen the relation between architectural descriptions of systems and components, a comprehensible mapping to component-oriented middleware platforms is important. Model-driven development with its use of generators can provide a suitable link between architectural views and technical component execution platforms. WCOP 2006 accepted 13 papers, which are organised according to the program below. The organisers are looking forward to an inspiring and thought provoking workshop. The organisers thank Jens Happe and Michael Kuperberg for preparing the proceedings volume

Independently Extensible

this paper we review the requirements of a componentmarket and show the role of component frameworks within it. We suggestdefit of the terms component framework, dimensions of extension, parallel extensions, and orthogonal extension

Putting Icons into (Con-) Text

Using icons as handles to objects allows for a new simple design paradigm for user interfaces. The key is a concept that inherits icons from graphical user interfaces and the interpretation of sequential text from traditional text interfaces. The basic tool is the object oriented text model. It is shown what power lies in the introduction of icons into text as well as how icons can be used in a better way, if being seen in some context. An implementation of the concept and some application examples are described. Introduction The world of user interfaces splits into two paradigms: Text based and graphical user interfaces. It is a tradition to consider these two paradigms as completely different. But, modern text editing systems have already proven that this is not true. At least, text systems based on text attributed with fonts, size, color etc. and supporting a pointing device like a mouse for input, have many aspects of a graphical user interface. Still, the basic data structure is ..