Section: New Results

Software Composition

Participants : Jean-Claude Royer, Hervé Grall, Christine Louberry, Mario Südholt.

ASCOLA's work on software composition addresses the foundations of software composition methods, the definition and implementation of concrete composition techniques and their application to different functionalities and application domains. This year we have contributed to the questions of how to identify components in legacy software, how to effectively deploy and reconfigure component-based software in pervasive environments, and how to apply software composition techniques to Cloud security as well as software product lines.

• Component identification. The communication integrity property is one of the major principles to implement software architectures, however, there is a lack of tooling for assessing the quality of components codes. To cope with this issue, we defined, in [23] , a Java component model and a tool for identifying component types based on the communication integrity property. We apply it to several case studies and compare the result with the SOMOX component recovery tool.

• QoS-driven deployment and reconfiguration of pervasive applications. [28] presents the Kalimucho platform, a platform for the dynamic reconfiguration of applications on mobiles and constraints devices. First this article focuses on the heuristics implemented by Kalimucho. They support finding a configuration and a deployment matching two criteria: utility and durability. Moreover, we present a case study to experiment the approach of Kalimucho. It confirms that Kalimucho provides a satisfactory execution time for mobile devices.

  A second result we have contributed in this context is a two-dimensional QoS model for Kalimucho that supports the QoS-driven deployment of mobile applications [29] . After presenting the definitions of the context and the quality of service considered in this work, this article describes the QoS model and the process allowing finding the best configuration and deployment. Finally, we present several results concerning the execution time of the deployment process of Kalimucho with different devices.

• Securing the Cloud: cross domain and multi-level concerns. The evolution of new deployment architectures, as illustrated by the move towards mobile platforms and the Internet Of Services, and the introduction of new security regulations (imposed by national and international regulatory bodies, such as SOX4 or BASEL5) are important constraints in the design and development of service composition. In such a context, it is not sufficient to apply the corresponding adaptations only at the service orchestration or at the choreography level; there is also the need for controlling the impact of new security requirements on several architectural layers. In [35] we have presented a new service model that supports the clean modularization of such crosscutting security concerns.

• Software composition and product lines. As part of the AMPLE project (see http://www.ample-project.net ) we have co-edited a book [42] covering the main scientific solutions and techniques on new methods and techniques for software product lines that have been developed in the project. This project aims at improving traditional software product lines engineering using advanced software engineering namely model-driven and aspect-oriented engineering approaches. Software composition takes an important part in this book and it appears in several chapters with models, events, aspects and components.

  Chapter [43] provides an overview of software product lines, model-driven engineering and aspect-oriented software development. The challenges to address and the expected benefits are drawn, this is concluded by an overview of the AMPLE approach and its tool chain.

  Chapter [40] reviews the specificities of traceability in a product line context starting by identifying the challenges of maintaining traceability for traditional system development and for software product lines. This work defines the concepts that should guide the adoption of a traceability environment for product lines and illustrates these specifications with a concrete example of a traceability repository. It also provides examples of scenarios that use this traceability environment to solve concrete problems.