Creating custom containers with generative techniques
Component containers are a key part of mainstream component technologies, and play an important role in separating non-functional concerns from the core component logic. This paper addresses two different aspects of containers. First, it shows how generative programming techniques, using AspectC++ and meta-programming, can be used to generate stubs and skeletons without the need for special compilers or interface description languages. Second, the paper describes an approach to create custom containers by composing different non-functional features. Unlike component technologies such as EJB, which only support a predefined set of container types, this approach allows different combinations of non-functional features to be composed in a container to meet the application needs.
The following casestudy provides a workflow perspective on the Grid ENabled Integrated Earth system modelling (GENIE) framework, which was introduced in Vol. 2.