iComponent: A Platform Independent Component Model for Dynamic Execution Environments

Service-oriented component models support the dynamic availability of components at run-time and offer the possibility to build dynamically adaptable applications. However, building service-oriented components is a complex task due to the complexity of service-oriented frameworks. In this context today frameworks try to simplify the component development by allowing developers to concentrate only on implementing the business logic of the component and then to configure declaratively the component deployment. In this paper we present a platform-independent component model, iCOMPONENT, which provides these features. We also define a UML profile for constructing components as UML models according to the OMG's model driven architecture. This work is part of a series refering to COMDEVALCO - a framework for software component definition, validation, and composition. As part of COMDEVALCO framework we present a tool for executing UML components expressed in terms of the proposed component model.