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Interface Relations/Roles

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After introducing the interface concept in the preceding section, we introduce the relationships a component can have with an interface. For the reading of this section, consider an intuitive understanding of the concept of a software component. Components are discusses in detail in the following section, but we first need the following concepts to justify our view on components.

According to Szyperski[], components have only explicit and contractually specified dependencies to their context. As interfaces serve as contracts, it makes sense to use them as the contracts needed. Two roles are associated with an interface contract: provide and require. Thus, it is important, whether the component takes the providing or the requiring role. The set of interfaces a component provides is called provided roles and the set of required interfaces required roles.

An open question is the semantics of the two relationships. For both of them, there are several options, which we discuss in the following.



Subsections
next up previous contents index
Next: Interpretations of Provided Interfaces Up: Component Developer (OLD) Previous: Interface Inheritance   Contents   Index
Snowball 2007-03-16