Flexible Packaging Methodologies for Rapid Deployment of Customisable Component-based Digital Libraries

摘要

Software engineering is a discipline concerned with manufacturing or developing software. Software plays a pivotal role in everyday life, an absence of which will be devastating to a number of governmental, recreational and financial activities, amongst many others. One of the latest branches of software engineering, component-based software engineering, is concerned with the development of software systems using already existing components which speculatively will ensure rapid and inexpensive software development processes.Parallel with the advances in software engineering, the field of digital libraries u2014 a field dealing with Web-based access to and management of structured digital content u2014 has adopted this development model from software engineering to shift focus from developing and using traditionally monolithic software systems to developing and using more flexible component-oriented software systems.Since componentised development approaches are relatively recent, other areas such as packaging and managing component-based software systems still remain unattended to. This dissertation presents research on techniques and methodologies for packaging customisable component-based digital libraries such that deployment is rapid and flexibility is not compromised. Although the reference point of this research was that of component-based digital library systems, it is believed that this research can be generalised across the family of Web-based component-based software systems.An outcome of this research was a prototype packaging system consisting of a pair of tools: a package builder tool and a package installer tool. This packaging system was developed to model the ideas and methodologies that were identified as important to the processes of packaging and installing component-based digital library systems. These tools consequently underwent a user evaluation study whereby they were evaluated for understandability, usability and usefulness to the processes of packaging and installing component-based digital libraries.A key contribution of this research was identifying requirements for a generic component packaging framework. For a component to be seen as u201dfit-to-packageu201d, it must posses the following at the very least: the component must be configurable automatically; the component must have a formal description of its dependency software; there must be formal descriptions that describe individual components as well as systems composed of components; and there must be a way whereby installation questions are formally encoded such that components are able to correctly receive configuration information.In totality, this research has shown that component-oriented software development approaches can benefit from an infrastructure which allows for component-based software systems to be composed, distributed and installed effortlessly.