Easy composition in Future Generation Component Systems
Software systems are increasingly being built by integrating preexisting components. A component is a piece of software that conforms to a component model, which defines its basic architecture and the mechanisms it uses to interact with its environment. These architectures facilitate the efficient creation of custom end user software by assembling prefabricated components. Active components are structured documents, which can be developed by different geographically distributed organizations. They evolve independently over time, having a life of their own. They may be shipped anywhere on the web, or embedded into other active components. Under this condition, managing independently developed, inter-related sets of components is a demanding task. The EU-funded IST Project EASYCOMP, which stands for Easy Composition in Future Generation Component Systems, focused on providing a uniform composition model and corresponding infrastructure facilitating composition of software artifacts over all the component lifecycle. In the context of EASYCOMP project, a C++ Servlet Environment (CSE) has been developed that provides a high performance servlet engine for C++. In this way the options of the web application developers are enhanced. Servlet is a small computer program, executed on a Web Server, which is designed to add capabilities to a larger piece of server software. High performance is a challenging prerequisite for servlet environments, which was met with the designed architecture. The CSE is accompanied by a C++ servlet application-programming interface (API) and syntax for C++ Server Pages that closely resembles that used by Java servlet environments. In this way developers get easily familiarized with the CSE environment. Furthermore, the Record Store, a sample web application, illustrates the use of CSE providing examples of servlets development. Using CSE environment yields benefits that are comparable to those of other popular servlet environments.
