Flexible Components with Frame Technology: A Case Study

Components are rarely reused “as are”. Most often, we must adapt components’ functions, interfaces and other properties to make them fit into a specific reuse context. Therefore, reusable components must be flexible. This paper is a case study in applying frame technology to inject flexibility into components. During reuse, we can engineer anticipated variant requirements into components by customizing framed components at breakpoints marked with the frame language commands. Framed components can be also extended with new, unexpected requirements that arise during system evolution. Frame technology has achieved excellent productivity improvements in engineering data processing COBOL systems for reuse. In this paper, we show how frame technology and concepts of flexible manufacturing can be effectively applied to component systems written in Java.