Towards Encapsulating Data in Component-Based Software Systems

A component-based system consists of components linked by connectors. Data can reside in components and/or in external data stores. Operations on data, such as access, update and transfer are carried out during computations performed by components. Typically, in current component models, control, computation and data are mixed up in the components, while control and data are both communicated by the connectors. As a result, such systems are tightly coupled, making reasoning difficult. In this paper we propose an approach for encapsulating data by separating it from control and computation.