Analyzing and Understanding Architectural Characteristics of COM+ Components

  • Authors:
  • Martin Pinzger;Johann Oberleitner;Harald Gall

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IWPC '03 Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Workshop on Program Comprehension
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Understanding architectural characteristics of software components that constitute distributed systems is crucial for maintaining and evolving them. One component framework heavily used for developing component-based software systems is Microsoft's COM+. In this paper we particularly concentrate on the analysis of COM+ components and introduce an iterative and interactive approach that combines component inspection techniques with source code analysis to obtain a complete abstract model of each COM+ component. The model describes important architectural characteristics such as transactions, security, and persistency, as well as create and use dependencies between components, and maps these higher-level concepts down to their implementation in source files. Based on the model, engineers can browse the software system's COM+ components and navigate from the list of architectural characteristics to the corresponding source code statements. We also discuss the Island Hopper application with which our approach has been validated.