An Encapsulation Structure and Description Specification for Application Level Software Components

Traditional research of software components mainly aims to components at the level of program and source code, due to which the coupling degree between the components and the runtime environments is hard to lower, thereby limiting the reuse ability of the component. The application level components containing comparatively integral granularity of business function are more suitable for a larger scale of application, while there is still lack of reference model and description specification in this field. The inherent deficiency of program level components is analyzed followed by the observation of the unique requirements of application level components, then a novel reference model is proposed. The main advantage of the model is to propel the integration and reuse of legacy software resources by means of transforming currently existing applications into application level components with the wrappers providing standard interfaces. The generalization and applicability of the model are evaluated by real cases.