. The aim of component technology is the replacement of large monolithic applications with sets of smaller software components, whose particular functionality and interoperation can be adapted to users' needs. However, the adaptation mechanisms of component software are still limited. Most proposals concentrate on adaptations that can be achieved either at compile time or at link time. Current support for dynamic component adaptation, i.e. unanticipated, incremental modifications of a component system at run-time, is not sufficient. This paper proposes object-based inheritance (also known as delegation) as a complement to purely forwarding-based object composition. It presents a typesafe integration of delegation into a class-based object model and shows how it overcomes the problems faced by forwarding-based component interaction, how it supports independent extensibility of components and unanticipated, dynamic component adaptation. 1 Introduction Component-oriented pro...

Abstract The advantages of virtual machine (VM) execution (dynamically loaded, portable object files with high-level information) also permit changing the semantics of executables. Load-time adaptation (LTA) intercepts the VM’s file operations and modifies object code on the fly, without changing the VM implementation, without needing access to source code, and without changing the actual files. We introduce a new technique, library-based LTA, and show how it can extend languages in such ways as adding contracts or mixins to existing classes, providing default code for interfaces, and instantiating parameterized types. We discuss an implementation of library-based LTA and its application to extending Java semantics. 1.

We propose here to enforce the correct configuration of generic components when dynamically reconfiguring them by encoding the rules governing the correctness using logic programming. Additionally, rather than using a classic logic language such as Prolog "as is", we want to use a logic language that allows the correctness rules to easily interact with the components. To achieve this we propose to use the concept of linguistic symbiosis and present a logic language that has such symbiosis with a component implementation language. The motivation for this proposal lies in the work on Generative Programming (GP) in which generic components are delivered as a set of ready features which can be put together to form an actual component [3]. The actual component, usually simply a class, is composed by a generator which also checks that the selected features meet certain inclusion requirements documented in a feature diagram. As GP is usually used in a context in which components are...