Generation of Asynchronous Component Adapters

AbstractUtilizing services of legacy and third party COTS components has become vital for the timely development and evolution of software systems. Component interfaces typically have to be adapted before they can be re-used in a system context. This paper presents an approach to generating component adapters. The approach focuses on mapping multiple events, and their associated parameters, generated from a source component to multiple calls in the target component. The novelty of our mechanism is that it allows developers to generate asynchronous as well as synchronous adapters. As a result we can generate adapters for components with incompatible event structure. A prototype called Asynchronous Component Adapter (ACA) was developed which demonstrates the idea with Java Beans, but the methodology can be applied to any component-based system that supports introspection like Microsoft .NET assemblies