Constructing Domain-Specific Component Frameworks through Architecture Refinement

A plethora of domain-specific component frameworks (DSCF) emerges. Although the current trend emphasizes generative programming methods as cornerstones of software development, they are commonly applied in a costly, ad-hoc fashion. However, we believe that DSCFs share the same subset of concepts and patterns. In this paper we propose two contributions to DSCF development. First, we propose domain components - a high-level abstraction to capture semantics of domain concepts provided by containers, and we identify patterns facilitating their implementation. Second, we develop a generic framework that automatically generates implementation of domain components semantics, thus addressing domain-specific services with one unified approach. To evaluate benefits of our approach we have conducted several case studies that span different domain-specific challenges.