Unanticipated Connection of Components Based on Their State Changes Notifications

Component-based software development is a promising track in software engineering to improve reuse. This paradigm is based on the unanticipated connection of independently developed black-box components. However, any existing proposals enable connections of components based on their state changes notifications without requiring that specific code related to the connection is integrated into components. In this article, we propose a solution to support these kinds of connections. Our solution introduces component properties and special connectors. We show that properties ease component programming and connectors enforce strict separation between functional code and code dedicated to connection. We develop a prototype in Squeak named SCL (Simple Component Language) to give a concrete form to our proposition.