Enabling reuse with a configuration language

Organized reuse of software components have been employed for several decades in Garex, a Norwegian company producing customized voice communication control switch systems. Through a process encouraging reuse, a large number of highly parameterized components have been crafted. However, the current manual approach to instantiating and connecting components is very complex and time-consuming, and increasing parts of the development costs are spent on this task. Through participation in the PROTEUS project, some practical work has been undertaken to assess the use of a configuration language to support system instantiation and evolution. The configuration language allows the description of components and systems, their properties and potential variability. By using the powerful intensional mechanisms for system binding and generation which are provided by the language and its supporting tool set, concise high-level descriptions for system instantiation are achieved.