A Lightweight Approach to Partially Reuse Existing Component-Based System in Service-Oriented Environment

A fundamental derailment factor for reusing today's business applications is the tight coupling among program components. While SOA advocates an architecture with loose coupling among components, the invocation dependencies among components are still tangled with implementation code traditionally. SCA (Service Component Architecture) - an emerging service-oriented component model - uses a standard and declarative way to handle inter-component dependencies. Thus, SCA components have better reusability from this perspective. This paper proposes a lightweight approach to partially reuse existing components by wrapping them as SCA components. Several challenges are identified and addressed in this paper, especially the one of externalizing component dependencies without changing source code. The proposed approach addresses the challenges systematically, with a supporting system implemented. Moreover, an example scenario is given to better illustrate the usage of the approach. Finally, some future directions of the work are pointed out.