Introduction to the special section on FASE 2003

Abstract

ion and modularization are key engineering principles, and have been recognized as two of the most important principles. Since the incipit of software engineering as a discipline. These principles underly themost important advances in software engineering and in particular in software design, from the early development of structure analysis and design, to object oriented development and design. The natural evolution of modular development and design approaches is towards component based software engineering, which applies abstraction and modularization to coarse grain artifacts. Component based software engineering (CBSE) opens newperspectives andopportunities, and is becoming a predominant approach to the development of industrial software in many key sectors. It presents new scientific and technological challenges from many perspectives, from component development to component assembly and integration, which require new scientific as well as technological advances. The many recent scientific results and technological breakthrough such as COM+, CORBA, EJB and J2EE, are only a first step towards a comprehensive framework for CBSE. Not surprisingly, the InternationalConferenceonFundamental Approaches to Software Engineering (FASE), one of the five key conferences of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS) and one of the key international scientific events on software engineering, attracts a lot of work on component based development and engineering. In 2003, FASEhostedmany relevant papers on component based development and design that led to fruitful and M. Pezze (B) Universita degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, Milan, Italy e-mail: pezze@disco.unimib.it lively discussions. Following the enthusiastic discussion, the FASE 2003 ProgramCommittee selected a set of relevant papers on component based software engineering and, thanks to the authors and the editorial board of the International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT), organized this special section. The selected papers focus on foundational as well as applicative aspects of CBSE. The first paper, Aspect Oriented Component Composition inPacoSuite through InvasiveCompositionAdapters by Wim Vanderperren, Davy Suvee and Viviane Jonckers, discusses the important problemof component integration [5]. The paper presents an original solution based on composition adapters that localize crosscutting concerns in separate and reusable entities. The second paper, The Composable Components Description Language (CCDL) by Ioana Sora, Pierre Verbaeten and Yolande Berbers, focuses on the specification of component integration, and proposes a specification language that captures functional and non-functional requirements, structural constraints and contract of the individual components [4]. The third paper, An Ontology for Software Component Matching by Claus Pahl, copes with the problem of matching requested and provided components [3]. It exploits ontologies to create a link between modal and description logics to reason about component behavior. The fourth paper, Towards UML-based formal specifications of component-based realtime software, by Vieri Del Bianco, Luigi Lavazza, Marco Mauri and Giuseppe Occorso, investigates the domain of real time software, and proposes the use of UML to formally specify realtime component based software systems [1]. The paper merges UML+ and UML-RT to obtain a powerful formal specification language for real time systems.