Towards Providing Software Component Interoperability Information on the WWW

Abstract

With the emerging software component technologies, increasing numbers of small components are expected to be developed, and fewer monolithic applications. In order to be able to successfully combine components to applications, issues of component interoperability will arise. Software component developers will require information about interoperating with existing components, and users will need to know what combinations of components they may employ in order to fulfil a certain task. While there does not yet exist a general established way of describing complete semantic information about components, we propose a more pragmatic approach to describe a level of interoperability based on information inherent in the software development process. The GIPSY (Generating Integrated Process support SYstems) [HREF3] project provides support for distributed software development processes, including extraction of interoperability information from the process. This paper presents a way of making such information available world-wide, by means of the WWW. Methods are proposed to map the information from the software development process in GIPSY to formats suitable for presentation on the WWW.

Keywords

Software Components, Interoperability Information, Software Development Process, Information Visualization, World-Wide Web