Adaptable Components for Software Product Line Engineering

This paper explores techniques for implementing adaptable software components. Such techniques can greatly facilitate the implementation of software product lines. The techniques we present allow the construction of large transparently adaptable components via composition and parameterization. Functional and structural adaptation, to any level of nesting, is achieved at the point of instantiation via recursive argument lists whose structure mirrors that of the component. The techniques are currently based on the C++ language, although work is under way to extend them to other languages (particularly Java).