A coding framework for functional adaptation of coarse-grained components in extensible ejb servers

Abstract

Separation of functional concerns is a major step for managing the complexity of large scale component systems. It allows the identification of well defined functional or non-functional dimensions in order to facilitate their assembly, adaptation and finally their reuse. Current component-based middleware and application servers offer container services that much more facilitate the reuse of the functional core throughout technical concerns, such as persistence, components distribution, transactions, security management, and so on. But they rarely offer facilities for the separation of functional concerns within this core itself. This contribution is dedicated to this question, specifically within the field of "coarse-grained view components". In the Information System domain, these components are common and capture "real-world semantics", that is a structured set of entities related to a specific functional concern. Inspired by previous works on Subject-Oriented or View-Oriented Modeling, we retain model templates as good candidates for the definition of coarse-grained reusable view components. We propose a framework to provide such components onto the EJB technology. It takes advantages of extensible containers and exploits their Aspect-Oriented Programming facilities in order to inject specific view services compatible with standard J2EE/EJB ones. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.