Building reusable software components for automated retrieval.

Abstract

The Computer Aided Prototyping System (CAPS) is designed to rapidly build prototypes of real-time systems. A critical element in achieving this goal is a mechanism for automated retrieval of reusable software components from a software base. There were two major objectives of this thesis: (1) to select and prepare software components for inclusion in the CAPS software base; (2) to design and implement a translation tool which takes an Ada specification as input and generates the prototype system description language (PSDL) interface required for storage and retrieval in the CAPS software base - this is necessary since for a component to be usable in the CAPS software base, it must be specified in PSDL. We described the abstraction and implementation of the selected components, introduced the translator, and demonstrated the behaviors of the translator via examples.