Increasing demand for commercial software components has led to a development and deployment issue of overcoming differences between the customer requirements and developer specifications for the component. Component Adaptation is one solution to the issue. This thesis focuses on modeling the adaptations to an Enterprise JavaBeanTM component using the Z notations and carrying out the adaptations using Active Interfaces adaptation technique. We also formally model the Active Interfaces adaptation technique.

One of the difficulties of Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE) [1] in reusing pre-existing components is the need to adapt these components to work within the desired target systems [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Third-party or in-house Commercial Off-the-shelf (COTS) components may not always have the required exact functionality demanded by the builders of the target system, so these systems have to be either modified [2, 3, 4, 5, 6] or adapted to provide this required functionality. Modifying these components may not be always practically possible. In this thesis, we propose an infrastructure that supports the active interface adaptation technique [3, 8, 9, 10]. This infrastructure directly addresses the problem of effectively packaging components for third-party use, adaptation, and deployment. Doing so we support both component designers and third party application builders. Further we evaluate our approach using several adaptations over the case studies.