Tez No	İndirme	Tez Künye	Durumu
401563		Non-intrusive instance level software composition / Yazar:KARDELEN HATUN Danışman: PROF. DR. MEHMET AKŞİT ; DR. CHRISTOPH BOCKISCH Yer Bilgisi: University of Twente / Yurtdışı Enstitü Konu:Bilgisayar Mühendisliği Bilimleri-Bilgisayar ve Kontrol = Computer Engineering and Computer Science and Control Dizin:	Onaylandı Doktora İngilizce 2014 167 s.
A software system is comprised of parts, which interact through shared interfaces. Certain qualities of integration, such as loose-coupling, requiring minimal changes to the software and fine-grained localisation of dependencies, have impact on the overall software quality. Current general-purpose languages do not have features that target these integration qualities at the instance level, hence they lack expressive power to define integration-specific code. As a result integration requires invasive code alterations, tightly coupled components that hinder maintainability and reuse. In this thesis, we focus on developing language extensions and frameworks, which offer a declarative way of defining the elements involved in the instance level software composition. Our motivation is that nonintrusive means of integration at the granularity of the instance level has an impact on the maintainability and the extensibility of the software. We focused on declarativeness since we want to improve how integration concerns are expressed in the implementation. We particularly focus on two challenges specific to the instance-level integration step; the two contributions proposed as a solution to each of these challenges both present declarative approaches for implementing specific concerns. These concerns are; 1. selecting objects based on how they are used in a system and, 2. non-intrusive implementation and injection of adapters. The first challenge is the difficulty of selecting objects based on other criteria than the type system. This is important during integration since, independent of their type, objects can become relevant to a component when they participate in specific events. Such events mark the phases in the life-cycle of objects. The phase in which an object currently is, affects how it is handled in an application; however phase shifts are often implicit. Selecting objects according to such phase shifts results in scattered and tangled code. To handle these problems, we introduce a novel aspect-oriented concept, called instance pointcuts, for maintaining sets that contain objects with a specified usage history. Specifics are provided in terms of pointcut-like declarations selecting events in the life-cycle of objects. Instance pointcuts can be reused, by refining their selection criteria, e.g., by restricting the scope of an existing instance pointcut; and they can be composed, e.g., by set operations. These features make instance pointcuts easy to evolve according to new requirements. The instance pointcuts approach adds a new dimension to modularity by providing a fine-grained mechanism and a declarative syntax to create and maintain phase-specific object sets. The second challenge we have tackled is establishing common interfaces between instances while maintaining loose coupling. To this end we have created an adaptation framework, called zamk, which unites dependency injection with under-the-hood adaptation logic. Due to limitations we have identified in the traditional adapter pattern, such as an increased number of dependencies and implementation challenges due to dependence on type inheritance, we have created the concept of converters, which are annotated classes that adhere to a specific structure. Converter classes do not have to inherit from other classes to implement the adaptation logic. They are defined by the user and managed by the zamk runtime; consequently the only dependency that needs to be introduced during integration is calls to the zamk API. zamk comes with its own dependency injection mechanism that is used with a designated domain-specific language called Gluer. The dependency injection logic is intertwined with the adaptation logic which queries a registry of converters to perform automated adaptation between two types. We automate the adaptation process by exploiting the type hierarchies and provide checks and context-relevant messages for correct integration. As a result the zamk framework provides a non-intrusive approach for adapting and binding software, which supports code reuse, software maintainability and evolution.