Strengthening Component Architectures by Modeling Fine-Grained Entities

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) defines components as basic software building blocks with strongly formalized behavior and interactions. The key benefits of structuring code into components include good analyzability of performance and behavioral correctness, simpler code generation, and high documentation value. However, a sufficiently detailed formalization including all relevant parts of application behavior often requires finer granularity than of a software component - a typical example is component's data exposed to other components that can circulate through the application, e.g., opened files, client sessions. In order to propagate all the mentioned benefits of CBSE to this level of granularity, we propose a conservative component model extension which allows to capture those concepts on the architecture level. Our main goal is to define a model allowing seamless integration in existing behavior specification formalisms and implementation in current component systems.