An Evaluation of Component Adaptation Techniques

Adapting existing code to include additional functionality or behavior is a common theme in software engineering. These e orts are complicated because the developer adapting the code will rarely be the designer of the code. As object-oriented and component-based software development achieve greater widespread use, there will be a distinct need to support such third-party adaptation. This paper describes the issues and challenges surrounding component adaptation and surveys various approaches in the literature. We evaluate these adaptation techniques by comparing their use in adapting an existing component in a sample application. Our experience leads us to a better understanding of the similarities and di erences between existing adaptation techniques.