Towards a model-driven approach to build component-based adaptable middleware

Adaptability is one of the goals that applications and middleware frameworks are trying to achieve. On one hand, the component paradigm is a way of reaching this goal by enforcing the reusability of functionalities involved in a component-based middleware framework. In particular, reflection could be combined with components to improve the adaptability of the structure of their assemblies. On the other hand, the model driven paradigm provides an efficient way to describe an application with enough abstraction to enable its mapping on various execution platforms. The contribution of this paper is a combination of both model and component paradigms to reach more adaptability in middleware, especially in a component-based framework to build transaction services. The framework presented uses models to describe middleware standards and compiles them to components. These components are coupled with a compliant component-based middleware framework. This approach provides adaptability at various levels with some added values.