A P2P-Based Component Library Interconnection Technique Supporting Query Refactoring

Software reuse is a feasible way to solve the software crisis. With the development of software reuse techniques and network techniques, more and more component libraries emerge on the Internet. However, the components that the reuser needs usually distribute in multiple libraries, and the ways of component description in those libraries are different. This makes the acquirement of components quite difficult. Thus, it is necessary to provide reusers with an effective mechanism to help them acquire components from multiple component libraries. Proposed in this paper is a component library interconnection technique called DCLITTA which supports resource sharing among distributed component libraries and supplies a ‘transparent’ retrieval mechanism to reusers. DCLITTA organizes independent component libraries in a flexible way by leveraging the peer to peer (P2P) network architecture. Meanwhile, to deal with the differences in component description models among component libraries, DCLITTA refactors reusers' queries automatically to improve the retrieval effect. Based on the technique introduced in this paper, the authors designed and implemented the supporting system which has already been put into practical use in the component libraries in Beijing and Shanghai software parks.