Towards constructing reusable specialization components

Abstract

Component-based software development advocates the reuse of generic off-the-shelf components to build complex and reliable applications. Unfortunately, the genericness of components results in degradation of system performance. Little progress has been made in promoting the specialization of a component independent of its use context. In this paper we propose a component specialization framework aiming at producing reusable specialization component which are adaptive to different specialization contexts. We advocate profitability declaration, a novel methodology to capture specialization opportunities independent of how components are deployed. This conceptual profitability declaration is translated into a profitability signature in the form of the binding-time constraint. A profitable specialization component, PSC for short, is then developed, aiming to be deployed in various applications in place of the original generic component, as well as to be adaptive to different specialization contexts. In addition to the merit of reusability, PSC also achieves a reasonable balance between multiplicity of specialized codes and the space required for keeping them. We believe that our framework will promote the usage of program specialization in component-based software development. Copyright © 2007 ACM.