Brechó-EcoSys: From a Component Library to a Software Ecosystems ...

Brechó-EcoSys: From a Component Library to a Software Ecosystems Platform Rodrigo Pereira dos Santos and Cláudia Maria Lima Werner System Engineering and Computer Science Department COPPE/UFRJ – Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Zip Code 21945-970 – Brazil {rps, werner}@cos.ufrj.br

Abstract. Components and services repositories are important to meet costeffectiveness and productivity goals in Software Reuse. These repositories need to provide diversified mechanisms to help services and components management and development processes, exploring their organization, evolution, trading, and underlying markets. This is important to a broad value definition of components and services for Software Ecosystems (SECO) platforms. This paper presents Brechó-EcoSys, a components and services reuse library with features and advanced mechanisms, aiming to support SECO. Keywords: Repositories, Components, Services, Software Ecosystems.

1 Introduction The treatment of economic and social aspects in Software Engineering was pointed out as a challenge for the next years, and Software Reuse is a strategic discipline in this context [1]. Brechó Project involves the development of Brechó Library, a Web information system that provides documentation, storage, publishing, search, and retrieval mechanisms for components and services, including a database with components, services, producers, and consumers, as supported by its version 1.0 [2]. However, a repository per si does not promote Software Reuse. A prerequisite to explore its potential is a collaborative market and/or environment for supporting components and services from different domains and contexts, developed and traded on a platform that joins a set of stakeholders (i.e., government, software industry, researchers, developers, clients, business staff etc.) [5]. Besides, this infrastructure should be coordinated by a software reuse management process [4]. So, the Brechó Project’s researchers started exploring Software Ecosystems (SECOs) as an evolution of Software Reuse. According to Jansen et al. [3], it consists of a set of businesses functioning as a unit and interacting with a shared market for software and services, together with the relationships among them, frequently underpinned by a common technological platform or market, and operating through the exchange of information, resources and artifacts. Thus, the Brechó Project’s evolution focuses on establishing an approach where developing with reuse and

developing for reuse are processes directly related to a platform kept alive by means of architecture, community (stakeholders), and business strategies and tactics. In order to evolve Brechó Library from an “implementation of a reuse repository” to an “implementation of a SECOs platform”, this paper presents Brechó-EcoSys, an environment to support value-based software reuse management in three dimensions: business, architectural, and social. Brechó-EcoSys represents an initial evolution of Brechó 1.0 (“pure” reuse management) with business mechanisms incorporated by Brechó-VCM (Value-based Component Market in Brechó).

2 Brechó-EcoSys Brechó-EcoSys aims to explore topics related to components and services libraries and marketplaces aiming to support fundamental and advanced mechanisms for a decision making process and a market environment with reusable assets. In this sense, the concept of components involves all reusable assets produced during the component lifecycle (e.g., process, documentation, models, code, binary etc.). 2.1 Brechó 1.0 In Brechó 1.0, documentation and publishing are based on a flexible concept of component. So, Brechó 1.0 allows the acquisition of different sets of packaged artifacts linked with personalized and configurable licenses. The documentation structure is based on nested categories, and dynamic and configurable templates. Thus, it is possible to classify a component into categories and category hierarchies (Fig. 2.a), besides creating and associating different documentation templates for each category, providing component documentation as a mosaic. Also, Brechó 1.0 manages a reuse map and the components’ dependencies. 2.2 Brechó-EcoSys’ Architecture As an evolution for SECOs, Brechó-EcoSys evolves the Brechó Project to turn Brechó Library into a distribution channel to support a component market and/or environment, which is a research prototype freely available to other research groups in [2]. Today, one of three dimensions (Section 1) is implemented, i.e., business view, whose physical architecture is presented in Fig. 1. As such, Pricing, Marketing, Evaluation and Visualization Mechanisms were incorporated in the Brechó-EcoSys as components integrated in an approach called Brechó-VCM [5]. The Pricing Mechanism aims at coordinating financial models to improve search and retrieval from publishing and acquisition activities (Fig. 2.b). The Marketing Mechanism, in its turn, focuses on collective intelligence models to explore component statistics and stimulate trades (Fig. 2. c), and the Evaluation Mechanism consists in incorporate credibility and experience models to support social status and relationships. Finally, the Visualization Mechanism explores insights-based information extraction models to support decision making process from manipulation

of historical data. The Evaluation Mechanism had to be adapted because some of its activities in Brechó-VCM depend on the Negotiation Mechanism, a future step in this research, related to the social view.

Fig. 1. Brechó-EcoSys developed from Brechó-VCM’s Architecture. 2.3 Brechó-EcoSys’ Implementation Brechó-EcoSys is a Web application implemented in Java Enterprise Edition technology, using Struts framework to support MVC architecture. The persistence is done through Hibernate framework (MySQL database). In the services infrastructure, Apache Axis2 component was used for implementing services API and publishing and automatically generating services through Brechó-EcoSys. Besides, Apache ODE component was used to support composed services building and providing.

3 Final Considerations This paper presented Brechó-EcoSys, a components and services reuse library with features and advanced mechanisms aiming at supporting platforms in SECOs. Experimental studies with software engineers in industry are being planned aiming to verify implemented mechanisms, mainly its use in real scenarios due to the main motivation: to provide a components and services environment in SECOs in a tridimensional perspective (Section 1). In this way, this research can contribute to explore new strategies to build SECOs on a components and services platform.

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Fig. 2. Component editing (a – hierarchical categorization mechanism), retrieval (b – pricing mechanism), and trading analysis (c – market mechanism) screens. Acknowledgments. The authors thank for FAPERJ/CNPq for their financial support.

References 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Boehm, B. 2006. A View of 20th and 21st Century Software Engineering. In Proc. of the 28th ICSE, Shanghai, China, pp.12-29, May. Brechó Project, at: . Access on Mar. 2011. Jansen, S., Finkelstein, A., and Brinkkemper, S. 2009. A Sense of Community: A Research Agenda for Software Ecosystems. In: Proc. of the 31st ICSE, New and Emerging Research Track, Vancouver, BC, Canada, pp. 187-190, May. Santos, R.P. and Werner, C.M.L. 2010. Revisiting the Concept of Components in Software Engineering from a Software Ecosystem Perspective. In: Proc. of the Fourth ECSA, 2nd Int. W. on Software Ecosystems, Copenhagen, Denmark, pp. 135-142, August. Santos, R., Werner, C., and Silva, M. 2010. Brechó-VCM: A Value-Based Approach for Component Markets. International Transactions on Systems Science and Applications, v. 6, n. 2/3 (Aug.), pp. 179-199.