Incremental Composition of Software Components

Abstract

In component-based systems, two interacting components are compatible if all sequences of services requested by one components can be provided by the other component. In the case of several components interacting with a single provider, as is typically the case in client–server computing, the requests from different components can be interleaved and therefore verifying component compatibility must check all possible interleavings of requests from all interacting components. Incremental composition of interacting components eliminates this need for exhaustive combinatorial checking of the interleavings by imposing some restrictions on the interleavings. The paper introduces simple conditions which must be satisfied by the interacting components for their composition to be incremental and illustrates the concepts using simple examples of interactions.