Architectures for software composition

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This research will study undesirable interactions or side effects in common software composition architectures. Composition approaches are the response by software vendors to the need to offer tailored systems, and to adapt their systems to rapidly changing market requirements. Various software composition approaches, including service-oriented architectures, plug-in architectures, and aspect-oriented approaches, have been developed to address the push for flexibility and extensibility. These composition approaches have in common that system components (services, plug-ins, or aspects) are assumed to be orthogonal, that is, they should not interact with one another. However, this is generally an incorrect assumption: the behavior of one component may be affected by the presence of other components. The problem of system components invoking or influencing one another directly or indirectly is known as the feature interactions problem. There is to date only a small body of work addressing the problem of undesirable interactions in open, distributed systems. Our goals in this research are, hence, to understand the commonalities of emerging software composition approaches to be able apply common approaches to detecting and resolving feature interactions; to have good methodologies to model, detect, and resolve feature interactions in component systems; to abstract generic patterns for resolving feature interactions from concrete cases; and to develop on-line techniques (eg plug-in interaction managers) for resolving feature interactions between components at runtime that can be integrated with current composition engines.