Towards generative software composition

Software systems are increasingly required to be open and distributed. Research on software composition proposes to build such open and distributed systems by "gluing together" basic building blocks (components) using certain kinds of connections between them. Whereas work in this area primarily focuses on more static aspects of composition in order to ensure that given collections of components cooperate successfully, the aspect of dynamically changing compositions is less elaborated. In this paper, we pick up ideas from generative coordination for open systems and develop the vocabulary of a composition language for modelling dynamic composition and recomposition for which the term generative software composition has been coined. We provide a formal semantics for our composition language which can be orthogonally integrated with the semantics of the objective Linda coordination model. We illustrate the expressiveness of our approach on an example.