The FRACTAL component model and its support in Java

Abstract

This paper presents FRACTAL, a hierarchical and reflective component model with sharing. Components in this model can be endowed with arbitrary reflective capabilities, from plain black‐box objects to components that allow a fine‐grained manipulation of their internal structure. The paper describes JULIA, a Java implementation of the model, a small but efficient runtime framework, which relies on a combination of interceptors and mixins for the programming of reflective features of components. The paper presents a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of this implementation, showing that component‐based programming in FRACTAL can be made very efficient. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Model of reconfiguration in component environments

“…Fractal [3] is a hierarchically-structured component model that provides reflective features which support dynamic architectural reconfiguration. It was developed by OW2 Consortium.…”

“…Fractal [3] does not support ad-hoc reconfiguration. Fractal also does not have formal support to ensure consistency.…”

OntoCompo: A Tool to Enhance Application Composition

“…We opt for applications developed with FRACTAL components [3]. For reusing of former applications parts, we use: (i) component-based software development to manipulate functionality assemblies and (ii) component-based UI with Java Swing JComponent encapsulated in FRACTAL component in order to manipulate concrete UI parts.…”

A flexible context stabilization approach for self-adaptive application

“…Our simulations are based on COSMOS [12](Context Entities Composition and Sharing), which is a framework for context management that uses the FRACTAL [13] component model. We also use the simulation engine SIAFU [14] to generate contextual informations.…”