Development of reusable components through the use of adapters

As information technologies evolve, computing environments become more distributed and heterogeneous. More and more software applications written in different programming languages running on different platforms with different operating systems are required to communicate with one another over different computer networks. Conflicts resulting from having heterogeneous and distributed computing environments require strategies for software interoperability. The emerging middleware technologies, including CORBA, COM/DCOM, .NET, J2EE, and Enterprise JavaBeans offer an industrial defacto standard communication infrastructure to support the interoperability of heterogeneous applications in components. However, the implementation of a component suffers from high interaction complexities in the component that seriously degrades the application independence. Software components should be built to be independent of the context in which they are used, allowing them to be reused in many different computing environments. In this paper, we are presenting an adapter in the adapter layer of an interconnection protocol model to isolate, encapsulate, and manage a component's interactions outside the component. The dynamic interface binding was designed to allow the adapter to examine the signature of the requested services at runtime such as operation names, parameter orders, parameter types, and parameter sizes. In addition, the interface language mapping allows an interface in a specific programming language to be automatically generated from an IDL interface. The use of adapters increases the reusability of components and also simplifies the integration of the components to an application.