A Lightweight Component-Based Development Approach for Enterprise Applications

Component-based development (CBD) is considered as a promising way to improve software productivity and quality by reusing some pre-existing components. However, in real practice, such a paradigm is not fully exploited by many enterprise application (EA) software companies because of the much needed effort and cost. For addressing these problems, we propose a lightweight approach that divides an EA into hierarchical component elements and maps them to a CBD environment based on Eclipse. Such an approach takes most characteristics of EAs into account and the modularity and reusability of the components are assured by OSGi. A real case study focusing on refactoring legacy software to a component-based one with our approach is illustrated its validity.