The ENT Meta-Model of Component Interface, version 2
Přemek Brada · 2004
Software modules and components have always played a key role in software engineering, primarily as key abstractions that embody the principle of information hiding. Modelling components is an increasingly important task, especially with the current interest in model-driven development and server-side component technologies. This technical report presents an update to the ENT meta-model for structuring component interfaces, originally defined in an earlier report (TR-2002-10 “The ENT Model: A General Model for Software Interface Structuring”) and author’s PhD thesis [6]. While the core of the meta-model has not changed, three important improvements have been made which warrant the creation this version 2 of ENT. Firstly, several clarifications of key concepts have been incorporated. This includes more precise terminology and enhancements to the classification system. Secondly, the meta-model has been re-structured for ease of comprehension. It now starts with the definition of component which has been enriched with component-level tags, and is recursively decomposed into traits and elements. Former categories have been moved outside the structure and, hopefully more appropriately, called views. Lastly, our recent work has resulted in the creation of the ENT model for Enterprise JavaBeans. It is included in this report in Appendix C, complementing SOFA and CORBA Component models. Also a XML representation of the ENT data has been added to this report. This work originated with support from the Research Plan MSM235200005 funded by the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic. Copies of this report are available on http://www.kiv.zcu.cz/publications/ or by surface mail on request sent to the following address: University of West Bohemia in Pilsen Department of Computer Science and Engineering Univerzitni 8 30614 Pilsen Czech Republic Copyright c ©2004 University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic