Engineering a component language: CompJava

Abstract

After first great enthusiasm about the new generation of component languages, a closer inspection and use identified together with very strong points some disturbing drawbacks, which seem to have been an important impediment for a wider acceptance. A restricted acceptance of component languages would be harmful since the integration of architecture description with a programming language increases the quality of application architecture and applications, as our experience confirms. Therefore, we took an engineering approach to the construction of a new Java-based component language without these drawbacks. After deriving component language requirements, we designed a first language version meeting the requirements and developed a compiler. We used it in several projects; and re-iterated three times through the same cycle with improved language versions. The result, called CompJava, to be presented in the paper seems to be mature for use in an industrial environment.