An interconnection language for reuse at the template/module level

Reuse is becoming a potent trend in software development and a major way to boost software productivity. To put reusable software units together, one has to be able to find them with minimal effort in the first place. The effort needed to access, understand, and customize the code must be less than the effort required to create new code. A simple library of components cannot provide sufficient methods to facilitate the selection and interconnection of the reusable modules. The context of this work is the ROPCO (reuse of persistent code and object code) environment and the primary candidates for reuse are the modules and templates. The objective of this article is to present the design of an interconnection language which can be incorporated with other ROPCO components to facilitate the selection, customization, and interconnection of reusable modules in the ROPCO software development environment. This language helps to define the interface specifications of the components and find the best module(s)/template(s) meeting the desired specification. The detailed algorithms of the operations that are necessary at the user level to support the reuse of available components are given and described in detail with a view toward verification.