Software’s expense owes partly to frequent reimplementation of similar functionality and partly to maintenance of patches, ports or components targeting evolving interfaces. More modular non-invasive approaches are unpopular because they entail laborious wrapper code. We propose Cake, a rule-based language describing compositions using interface relations. To evaluate it, we compare several existing wrappers with reimplemented Cake versions, finding the latter to be simpler and better modularised.

Abstract: Software adaptation techniques appear in many disparate areas of research literature, and under many guises. This paper enables a clear and uniform understanding of the related research, in three ways. Firstly, it surveys a broad range of relevant research, describing and contrasting the approaches of each using a uniform terminological and conceptual vocabulary. Secondly, it identifies and discusses three commonly advocated principles within this work: component models, first-class connection and loose coupling. Thirdly, it identifies and compares the various modularisation strategies employed by the surveyed work.