Component-Based Approaches to Tailorable Systems

Flexibility is one of the most striking features of modern software. As the idea of integrating components is easily understood by programmers as well as end users, component architectures seem to be very promising to serve as a technological basis. In this chapter we give an overview of our work in the last years. A component model called FLEXIBEANS has been designed with the special notion to develop highly flexible and tailorable applications. The FREEVOLVE platform then serves as an environment in which compositions can be run and tailored. The second part of the chapter deals with the development and evaluation of different tailoring environments in which end users can compose their own applications or tailor existing ones. Users tests showed that besides a coherent technical basis and a manageable visual tailoring environment, there is a need for additional support techniques. We discuss how techniques to support users’ individual and collective tailoring activities can be integrated into the user interface.

Key words. tailorability, platform, component architecture, user interface, collaborative tailoring, evalution.