An empirical study of the component dependency resolution search space

  • Authors:
  • Graham Jenson;Jens Dietrich;Hans W. Guesgen

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Engineering and Advanced Technology, Massey University, New Zealand;School of Engineering and Advanced Technology, Massey University, New Zealand;School of Engineering and Advanced Technology, Massey University, New Zealand

  • Venue:
  • CBSE'10 Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Component-Based Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Dependency Resolution (DR) uses a component's explicitly declared requirements and capabilities to calculate systems where all requirements are met. DR can lead to large amounts of possible solutions because multiple versions of the same component can be available and different vendors can offer the same functionality. From this set of potential solutions DR should identify and return the optimal solution. Determining the feasibility of many optimisation techniques largely depends on the size and complexity of the DR solution search space. Using two sets of OSGi components collected from the Eclipse project and Spring Enterprise Bundle Repository, we measure the size and examine the complexity of the DR search space. By adding simple constraints based on desirable properties, we show the potentially large search space can be significantly restricted. This restriction could be used to make more complex optimisation algorithms feasible for DR.