Code generation to support static and dynamic composition of software product lines

  • Authors:

  • Marko Rosenmüller;Norbert Siegmund;Gunter Saake;Sven Apel

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany;University of Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany;University of Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany;University of Passau, Passau, Germany

  • Venue:
  • GPCE '08 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Generative programming and component engineering
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Software product lines (SPLs) are used to create tailor-made software products by managing and composing reusable assets. Generating a software product from the assets of an SPL is possible statically before runtime or dynamically at load-time or runtime. Both approaches have benefits and drawbacks with respect to composition flexibility, performance, and resource consumption. Which type of composition is preferable should be decided by taking the application scenario into account. Current tools and languages, however, force a programmer to decide between static and dynamic composition during development. In this paper, we present an approach that employs code generation to support static and dynamic composition of features of a single code base. We offer an implementation on top of FeatureC++, an extension of the C++ programming language that supports software composition based on features. To simplify dynamic composition and to avoid creation of invalid products we furthermore provide means to (1) validate the correctness of a composition at runtime, (2) automatically instantiate SPLs in case of stand-alone applications, and (3) automatically apply interaction code of crosscutting concerns.